LIVE COALS, 



FROM THE DISCOURSES OF 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE, D. D. 

AUTHOR OF "THE MASQUE TORN OFF," " NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE," 
"FOES OF SOCIETY," "TRAPS FOR MEN," " CRUMBS SWEPT 
UP," "AROUND THE TEA TABLE," ETC., ETC. 



COLLATED BY 



1° 



LYDIA E. WHITE. 



COMPILATION AUTHORIZED BY DR. TALMAGE. 



DEC 11 ,385 A 1 



CHICAGO. 

FAIRBANKS & PALMER PUBLISHINGICO. 

l88 5 . 




COPYRIGHTED BY 

L. T. PALMER, 
1885. 



PUBLISHER'S PREFACE. 



In issuing " Live Coals " from our press we do it in 
the firm conviction that the Christian community of 
the English-speaking world will appreciate this 
volume. The work embraces the most popular and 
powerful discourses of Dr. Talmage, as delivered by 
him during the past year in the Brooklyn Tabernacle 
and elsewhere, and are here for the first time collated 
and published in book form. 

These interesting discourses are written in his most 
powerful descriptive powers — sparkling with grace- 
ful imagery, and illustrated with interesting anec- 
dotes. They will be found the keenest, sharpest, and 
most vigorous specimens of oratory ever written, 
and for originality, force and splendor, will bear a 
favorable comparison with the greatest pulpit pro- 
ductions of any age or country. 

The work has been divided into four sections or 
parts. I. Coals for the Individual. II. Coals for the 
Church Militant. III. Coals for the Moral Realm. 
IV. Coals for the National Arena. They are Dr. 
Talmage's best efforts in his earnest aggressive war- 
fare upon the foes of society and the State ; they ex- 
pose the traps and pitfalls that beset the youth of 

v 



vi publisher's preface. 

our land on every hand, every page burning with 
eloquent entreaty for a better and purer life, possess- 
ing an intense, soul-absorbing interest to all who 
desire the advancement and higher development of 
the human race. The editor of the Christian Age, 
London, England, truly voices the sentiment of all 
admirers of Dr. Talmage when he said : " For knowl- 
edge of human life, and the adaptation of Divine 
truth to the whole being of man — intellectual, emo- 
tional, moral, practical — and for the power of apply- 
ing that truth, we know not his equal." 



CONTENTS. 



Preface 5 

Table of Contents 7 

BIOGRAPHY. 

Birthplace — Date of Birth — Parents — Reminiscences of his Child- 
hood, as given at London, Eng., Aug. 12, 1885 — Anecdotes of Family 
— A Great Revival — The Reformed Dutch Church — Converskm — 
College Days — Theological Seminary — Early Ministerial Life — Pas- 
torate at Belleville, N. J.— At Syracuse, N. Y.— At Philadelphia, Pa. 
—Call to Brooklyn— The Old Tabernacle— Present Stately Edifice— 
The Tabernacle Audiences — The Newspapers — The Lay College — 
Pastoral Work — Secular Criticism — Foreign Criticism — Visit to Eng- 
land in 1885 — AtWesleyan Chapel, London — At Presbyterian Synod 
Hall, Edinburg— Editorial Criticism— The Welcome Home— Dr. 
Talmage's Address , , 25 



SECTION I. 
COALS FOR THE INDIVIDUAL. 



CHAPTER I. 

BUSINESS LIFE. 

The General Impression— God's Intentions — A School of Energy 
— God's Demands — Anecdote of a Millionaire — A School of Patience 
— Of Useful Knowledge — Traders — Manufactures — A School of In- 
tegrity — Temptations of To-Day — Honesty — Scarcity of Commercial 
Honesty — Men who Have Conquered — Heavenly Rewards 43 

CHAPTER II. 

GNATS AND CAMELS. 

The Grub— The Camel— Religious Work— Humor— The Infini- 
tesimals—The Magnitudes— Large versus Small Thefts— Prison for 
Small Crimes — Palaces for Large Crimes — Nervousness and Dyna- 

vii 



Viii CONTENTS. 



mite — Dishonest Fruit Dealers — False Crop Reports — Society Needs 
Reconstruction — False Statements to Assessors — All More or Less 
Guilty 5 1 



CHAPTER III. 

THE INSIGNIFICANT. 

Trouble Develops ^Character — Is an Educator — A Young Doctor 
— Grecian Mythology — Past National Distresses — Adversity Proves 
Friendship — Life a Game — Paths of Hardship and Darkness — The 
Hour of Conviction — Alone — No more Hunger or Thirst — Persecu- 
tion of Christians — The Reward — The Importance of the Insignifi- 
cant—Indolence—The Gleaner 57 



CHAPTER IV. 

PAUL IN A BASKET. 

Great Results Hang by Slender Tenure — Paul's Life — His Great 
Work — Moses' Tiny Craft — Rescue of John Wesley — Pitcairn Island 
— Infinity made up of Infinitesimals — What you do, do Well — Un- 
recognized and Unrecorded Services — Paul's Rescuers — Early Strug- 
gles of Ministers — The Son at College — The Sacrifices of the Family 
— Early Influences and Prayers 69 



CHAPTER V. 

THE NEEDLE. 

The Praises of the Needle — Operatives — Its Triumphs — Its Cruel- 
ties — Its Charities — Practical Benevolence — Earnest Christian Man — 
Against Theorists — Female Benevolence Written on every Page of 
History — The Women of the Civil War— The Unmissed — Josephine's 
Funeral — The Grief of the French Poor 76 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE SECRET OUT. 

The Amalekites — Saul's Success — Agag's Life Spared — Wrath ot 
God — Samuel not Deceived — The Hypocrisy of Saul— Hypocrisy 
Always Exposed — Hypocrites in the Church — The Venom of Eccles- 
iastical Courts — Ottocar and Randolphus I — Hypocrisy not Confined 
to the Church — Putting off Sin on Others — Extermination Necessary 
— Mere Profession Amounts to Nothing — Value of a Church Certifi- 
cate in Wall Street— The Church up with the Times — What we 
Need 81 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE EYE. 

An Imperial Organ — The Marvels of the Human Eye — Eyes ot 
Animals and Reptiles — The Window of the Soul — God's Preparation 



CONTENTS. 



IX 



for its Reception — Its Residence — The Contrivances of the Eve — Its 
Elaborate Gearing— The Retina— The Tear Gland— Wonderful Hy- 
draulic Apparatus — Anecdotes — Bell's Treatise on the Human Hand 
— The Recoil of the Question — The Great Searching, Overwhelming 
Eye of God 89 



CHAPTER VIII. 



THE EAR. 



Architecture of Nations — The Human Ear — Its Overmastering 
Architecture— Scientists— The External Ear— The Middle Ear— The 
Internal Ear — The Hidden Machinery of the Ear — Defies Human In- 
spection — Vibrations per Second— A Life Long Study — The Musical 
Composers — Its Attempted Conquest — Its Wonders Planned by 

iehovah — The Sacred Touch — Look for God in the Infinitesimal — 
J" earness of God — The Phonograph — The Ear of God 97 



CHAPTER IX. 



YOUR PEDIGREE. 



A Mighty Question — Blue Blood — Characteristics from Genera- 
tion to Generation — The Blood of Nationalities — Law of Heredity — 
Personal Responsibility — Christian Ancestry — Early Association — 
The Unwritten Will of the Christian Parent — Vast Responsibility 
Imposed— A Trustee— The Unwritten Will of the Wicked— Evil 
Parentage — Overcoming its Stigma — An Heir of Immortality.. . 109 



CHAPTER X. 



HOME. 



Piety at Home — Faithfulness in an Insignificant Sphere — The 
Definition of Home by Different Persons — The Contented Home — 
The Wretched Home — Pirvate Character — Reputation — Bad Temper 
at Home — Affable in Public — Home a Refuge — A Political Safe- 
Guard — Christian Hearth-Stone — Home a School — Words and Deeds 
— Brightest Place on Earth — Cheerfulness — Decorations of the Home 
— Good Cheer 121 



CHAPTER XI. 

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 



The Evolutionist's Guess — Ask the Young Man — A.sk the Man 
of Forty — How to Decide the Question — Mere Money Getting a 
Failure — The Disease of Accumulation — Worldly Approval — Intel- 
ligence— Social Position — High Social Life — A Life that is Worth- 
Living — Opportunities and Responsibilities — Peter Cooper — Grace 
Darling — The Reward 131 



X 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER XII. 

SOLICITUDE. 

Cause of Parental Solicitude — Parental Imperfection — Conscious 
Insufficiency — The Result of too Strict Discipline — Too Great Se- 
verity — Too Lenient — Childish Sinfulness — Nagging at Children — 
Temptations — A Farewell to Innocence — Traps set for the Young — 
Sin Invades the Sacred Precincts of Home — No Statistics Compiled 
of Ruined Homes — The Alleviations — Immediate Correction — Inno- 
cent Hilarity , . . 140 

CHAPTER XIII. 

ANANIAS AND SAPPHIRA. 

Various Ways of Lying— Acquired and Natural — The Tendency in 
Rural Districts — The Producer — Plotting of Speculators — God Help 
the Merchants — Fortunes Made by Dishonesty — Large Fortunes 
Made Honestly — Dishonesties of Speech — The Merchants — Cus- 
tomers — Artisans — Insincerity of Society — False Statements of De- 
nominations — Misrepresentations of Individual Churches — No such 
Thing as a Small Sin 15c* 

CHAPTER XIV. 

THE BALANCE SHEET. 

Short Allowances — Taking Stock — Christian Liabilities — A Title 
Deed — Refinement of Life — Sweet Sounds of the World — The Vi- 
cissitudes of Life — All Things for our Good — The Christian's Assets 
in this World and the Next — Death, a Black Messenger — Not a Ruffian 
—No Tears— "All are Yours"— The Invalid's Reward— That Glo- 
rious Consummation 159 

CHAPTER XV. 

THE NOONTIDE OF LIFE. 

The Best Part of Life's Journey — Tranquility and Repose — Youth 
— Manhood — Old Age — Wholesale Slander — Looking Backward — 
Do Your Best — All Events are Connected — The Picture Galleries of 
the Past — Satan's Appetite — The Home Gallery — Looking Forward 
— Going Through — A Look Beyond — Faith's Strength 166 

CHAPTER XVI. 

A SCROLL OF HEROES. 

Merits Acknowledged — Historical Heroes — Heroes of Common, 
Everyday Life— The Sick-Room Heroes— The Heroes of Toil — 
The Slain by the Needle — Heroes who have Endured Domestic In- 



CONTENTS. 



XI 



justices — Social Wrecks — A Perpetual Martyrdom — The Drunkard's 
Wife — Heroes of Christian Charity — Melrose Abbey — The-Righteous 
Never Forsaken — The Great Chaplain's Cheer 174 

CHAPTER XVII. 

THE BURDENS LIFTED. 

Wells of Water — Dr. Talmage Leaving Home — A Practical Re- 
ligion Necessary — Business Burdens — A World of Burden Bearing — 
Toiling for Others the Incentive — Grip, Gouge & Co. — God's Interest 
in one's Business — The Story of a Young Accountant — God's Sym- 
pathy — A Weight of Persecution and Abuse — High and Holy En- 
terprise Always Abused — The Treachery of the Befriended — A 
Cynic — The Ill-Treated in Good Company 182 

CHAPTER XVIII. 

THE DAY WE LIVE IN. 

What this Age Expects of Every One- An Aggressive Christian — 
The Prince of Wales' Visit — Piety too Exclusive — The Cactus of 
North Carolina — Self-Examination — A Stalwart Christian Character 
— The Century Plant — Average of Human Life — The Years Re- 
quired in Earning a Livelihood — The Years Spent in Sleep and 
Recreation — The Years Spent in Childhood and Sickness — The Time 
Left for Exclusive Service of God — Responsibilities not Discharged 
by Liberal Giving — Avoid Reckless Iconoclasm — Scoffing — Storm 
the Fortress of Sin— Work for All— Unbounded Faith— Fall of 
Tyranny — The March of the Hosts of the Living God 189 

CHAPTER XIX. 

THE OLD FOLKS' VISIT. 

The Blessings of a Parental Visit — Poor Relations — Father of 
Large Wealth Should Retain Possession — The Undutiful Son — 
Share Success with Parents — The Praises of the Unmarried Sister- 
hood—A Queen of Self- Sacrifice— The Maiden Aunt— The Bible 
Narratives of Unfilial Conduct — Ruth and Naomi 200 

CHAPTER XX. 

ORDINARY PEOPLE. 

A Religion for Ordinary People — The Vast Majority — The 
Women at the Head of Households — Food Providers Decide the 
Health of the World — The Martyrs of Kitchen and Nursery — Ordi- 
nary Business Men — Gray Hairs at Thirty — Ages Rapidly — Divine 
Grace Wanted — Possess the Friendship of Christ — Ordinary Farmers 
— Christ's Best Parables Drawn from the Farmer's Life — The Stone 
Mason — The Carpenters — The Physicians — If Ordinary, Thank God 



xii 



CONTENTS. 



You are not Extraordinary — Abuse and Slander of the Extraordinary 
— Be Content with Things we Have 205 

CHAPTER XXI. 

THE LACHRYMAL. 

The Lachrymals of the Ancients— The Story of Paradise and the 
Peri— The Return of the Lost Sheep— The Wanderer— The Falling 
Tear Unreported — The City Missionary — The Parents' Solicitude — 
The Training of Children — The Heavenly Record — Sanctified Sor- 
rows — Gems of Light — Bright Jewels of Heaven — God's Bottle.. 218 

CHAPTER XXII. 

SUNSET. 

A Dismal Thing — The Gloom y Hour of Temptation — The Strong 
Beneficent Influence of Jesus Necessary — "Abide with Us" — The 
Greatest Folly— The Cry of a Child— The Mother's Care— The Sud- 
den Loss of Earthly Estate — A Friend's Treachery — The Accumula- 
tion of Misfortunes — Trouble must be Met and Borne — The Com- 
forting Influence of a Christian's Belief. 227 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

THE FERRY BOAT OVER THE JORDAN. 

Trying to Extemporize a Way to Heaven — The Miserable Work 
of Such — The Ferry Boat to Come from the Other Side — Thomas 
Walsh — A Delusion Broken— The Journey to Heaven is not Alone — 
Last Testimony of the Faithful— Only a Ferry — No Great and Peril- 
ous Enterprise — A Solid Landing — A Real Place — John's Material- 
istic Heaven Satisfactory — The Welcome of Friends — The Recog- 
nition of All — The Romance in the Life of Judson 232 



SECTION II. 
COALS FOR THE CHURCH MILITANT. 241 
CHAPTER XXIV. 

DOWNFALL OF CHRISTIANITY. 

The Rising Sun of Our Time— The World without the Sun— In- 
fidelity and Atheism — The World without Christianity — Degrada- 
tion of Womanhood — What Christianity has done for Woman — 
What Infidelity Would Do— The Death Bed of the Wicked— The 
Mightiest Restraints of To-day— The Grand March of Infidelity- 
Will Infidelity Succeed? 243 



CONTENTS. 



xiii 



CHAPTER XXV. 

EVOLUTION. 

No Contest Between Science and Revelation — Witnesses Pro and 
Con — Herbert Spencer — Huxley — Darwin — The Bible on Evolution — 
A Question Propounded — Theory of Evolution is Infidel — Agassiz — 
Boast of Evolutionists —Their Theories Shattered — Their Wander- 
ings — Testimony Against Evolution — A Magnificent Theory — Sur- 
vival of the Fittest — Spontaneous Generation — No Natural Progress 
— Natural Evolution Downward — Develops Dishonesty — Theory of 
Evolution Older than Christianity 252 

CHAPTER XXVI. 

THE MISSING LINK. 

The Ancestral Line— The Brute— Man— The Brain of the Gorilla 
—The Brain of the Hottentot— Blood Globule— A Different Creation 
— Darwin's System — Species Unchanged and Unchangeable — Your 
Predecessors — Evolution a Mystery - Brutalizing in its Tendency — 
Annihilation — The Bible Narration — Divine Evolution — Monarchs 
of Earth — Evolution from Contestant to Conqueror 267 



CHAPTER XXVII. 

EVANGELISM VINDICATED. 

A Roman Evangelist — Eating the Book — The Creeds of the Peo- 
ple — Evangelical Religion — The Belief of the Different Denomina- 
tions — How they are Slandered — A Charmed Key — Two Destinies 
Demanded by One's Common Sense — The Trinity — Justification by 
Faith — Regeneration — Reconstruction Easily Understood 276 

CHAPTER XXVIII. 

SPLENDORS OF ORTHODOXY. 

An Inspired Bible — No Element of Weakness — Stood the Assaults 
of Time — Errors in Transcribing — Advanced Thinkers — Freedom 
in Religious Thought and Discussion — Change of Theories — The 
Political Parties— What I Believe to be Right — What Orthodoxy 
Has Done — The Influence of the Entire Bible — Splendors of Charac- 
ter — The Certitudes — Palace and Penitentiary — Advancements of 
Our Time 284 

CHAPTER XXIX. 

MENDING THE BIBLE. 

A Risky Business — The Book of Genesis — Disbelief of Portions 
of the Bible — Liberty of Discussion — The Heinousness of Fault 
Finding — The Old Gospel Ship Opposes Expurgation — Implicit Be- 
lief — Bible Miraculously Preserved— A Matter of History — The Cata- 



XIV CONTENTS. 



logue Unchanged for Ages— All Attempts to Detract or Add to 
—Failures— The Bible Liked As It Is— A Division— Critics Severely 
Handled 292 



CHAPTER XXX. 

THE GLORIOUS MARCH. 

The Glory of the Church— The Church Ahead of the World— 
Her Possessions— The Blessings of the Poor— The Church Com- 
pared to the Moon — The Only Institution That Gives Light to the 
World— Weathered all Storms— Light for all Classes and Conditions 
of People — Compared to the Sun — The Great Missions of Christ — 
The Church Triumphant — Religious Enthusiasm — Christ as a 
Leader , 301 

CHAPTER XXXI. 

SHAMS IN RELIGION. 

The Religion the. World Wants — A Practical Religion— What 
Such a Religion Will Do — Adulteration of Articles of Commerce — 
The Remedy— Philanthropy Does Not Atone For Sin — Mechanism 
Rectified — Religion in Agriculture — Religion in the Learned Profes- 
sions—Religion and Good Society — Missionary Work Among the 
Upper Classes — The Marriage Relation — A New Departure — A 
Beautiful Theory — Witnesses of Practical Religion 310 



CHAPTER XXXII. 

THE BEAUTY OF RELIGION. 

The Crystal — No Happen-So's in Theology — Not a Slipshod 
Universe — A House of Sorrow — Superior in Transparency — A Trans- 
parent Bible — Surpasses in its Beauty — Cross and Crown — Beautiful 
in its Symmetry — Not a State Religion — Superior in its Transforma- 
tions — Minerals — Early Dissipation — Chief Transforming Power not 
of this World— Kill Sin or it will Kill You. 322 



CHAPTER XXXIII. 

RELIGION AN ANTISEPTIC. 

Grace Like Salt— Beyond Human Skill — Beautiful and Beautify- 
ing—A Healthy Religion— What the Grace of God Will Do— A 
Necessity of Life— Must Have More Faith— The Preservative of 
Governments — The Trouble with Modern Philosophy — The Morning 
Star of Jesus ; , 335 



CHAPTER XXXIV. 

THE SPICERY OF RELIGION. 

Theologians Agree — Religion Compared — A Glorious Inspiration 
— Necessary to the Housekeeper— An Inspired Religion — Lugubri- 



CONTENTS. 



XV 



ous Christians a Damage to Christianity — More Sunshine and Fresh 
Air Necessary — Cheer the Sick and Poor — The Two Ways of 
Meeting the Poor — Church Music — A New Crusade — A Present 
and an Everlasting Redolence — Chasing the Dead— Comfort and 
Satisfaction 341 

CHAPTER XXXV. 

LIVE CHURCHES. 

Financial Engagements Promptly Met — Half Starved Pastors 
— The Niggardliness of Many Churches — Punctuality — A Grand 
Delusion — Congregational Singing — The Methodist Church En- 
circles the World — A Flourishing Sunday School — Vast Multitudes 
Outside — Those Little Feet— That Spark of Iniquity— Now a Great 
Army — Only a Child — Commodious and Appropriate Architecture — 
A Soul Saving Church — All Must do their Best 346 

CHAPTER XXXVI. 

MUSIC IN WORSHIP. 

The Best Music — The Scotch Covenanters — The Animalculse 
have their Music — The Music of the Bible — The First Organist — 
The White Robed Levites — What is Appropriate Music — Adaptive- 
ness to Devotion — A Distinction— Church- Psalmody — Correctness — 
Spirit and Life — Drawling and Stupidity — Congregational — Our 
Duty — " Gloria in Excelsis." 359 

CHAPTER XXXVII. 

ABOLITION OF SUNDAY. 

The Sabbath's Sanctity — A Seventh Day Rest Necessary for Man 
and Beast — Interesting Testimony — Secular Amusements — The Grog 
Shops — The People's Rights — Opposed to all Infractions — A Paris 
Incident — A French Sabbath Compared to an American — The May 
Flower — When it will be Destroyed 365 

CHAPTER XXXVIII. 

THE BLOOD. 

Conscience — A Personal Knowledge When Sin is Committed — 
The Moral Man Not Exempt from Sin — Astray in Many Directions 
—The Bible's Charge— The "Rider on the White Horse."— Died for 
their Faith— Different Kinds of Hands— At the Sea Beach— The 
Password at the Gate of Heaven 372 

CHAPTER XXXIX. 

CAN THE UNPARDONABLE SIN BE COMMITTED IN OUR TIME? 

The Sin Against the Holy Ghost — Not Possible to Commit that 
Sin Now — An Irrevocable Sin — Impossible to Correct Mistakes — 



xvi 



CONTENTS. 



God Forgives but Nature Never — Correcting Bad Habits in Children 
— Incidents and Anecdotes — Lost Opportunities— Getting Good — 
Usefulness — Now is Your Time . 378 



CHAPTER XL. 

INTOLERANCE. 

Difference in Pronunciation — Differences in Denominations — 
Liberty of Conscience — Agitation Tends to Purification and Moral 
Health — Truth will Conquer — Bigotry a Child of Ignorance — Causes 
of Bigotry — An Especial Mission — People Disgusted — Sectarianism 
— How to Build — Astor Library — English Law Against the Jew — 
Gospel Platforms — How to Overthrow Intolerance — Christian 
Charity 3 8 S 



CHAPTER XLI. 

THE WITNESS STAND. 

Science against Inventions — Science against the Resurrection of 
Christ — A Play with the Skeptic — Testimony versus Argument — The 
Weapon Used* in -this Conflict — We Are Witnesses — What It Has 
Done for Us — Conversion Alone Conquers Appetite — Power of the 
Comforter — The World Powerless to Comfort — Power to Give Com- 
posure — The Deathbed of the Christian — Their Testimony and Tri- 
umphs . . .396 

CHAPTER XLII. 

THE GOSPEL LOOKING-GLASS. 

The Gospel — The Tabernacle— The Laver — The Looking-glasses — 
Different Mirrors — Ourselves Seen as We Are — God's Mercies Thank- 
lessly Received — Pride — Why so Few Conversions — A Laver Nec- 
essary — Fresh Testimony Required — Where the Trouble Lies — 
Pervades Man's Whole Nature — Washing Imperative, not Optional — 
Comfort 405 



CHAPTER XLIII. 

RELIGION IN DRESS. 

The First Wardrobe— The Goddess of Fashion— The Victims of 
Fashion — Fashion with Men — Animated Checker Boards — Corsets — 
Destroying and Deathful Influences — Fraud — Expensive Wardrobes 
Cause of Defaultings — Country Dressed to Death — The Tragedy of 
Clothes — The Foe of all Alms Giving — Greatest Obstacles to Charity 
— "A Love of a Bonnet" — Public Worship Distracted — Belittles the 
Intellect — No Seat in Heaven for the Devotee of Fashion 415 



CONTENTS. 



xvii 



CHAPTER XLIV. 

THE COMING SERMON. 

The Sermon of To-Day— What Is the Matter— Un suited to the 
Age — Convert the Sermon — Full of a Living Christ — A Loving 
Christ— A Short Sermon— Where the Trouble Lies— Europe Thrilled 
— A Popular Sermon— Theological Professors— Churches Thronged — 
An Awakening Sermon — An Everyday Sermon 425 



PART III. 

COALS FOR THE MORAL REALM. 
CHAPTER XLV. 

THE GATES OF HELL. 

The Gates Described — The Tuilleries — Impure Literature — Scien- 
tific and Medical Novelette Literature — The Leprous Booksellers — 
Family Libraries Should be Explored — The Dissolute Dance — Indis- 
creet Apparel — The Fashion Plates of any Age — Alcoholic Beverage 
— The Chief Abetter of Sin — Gates Swing In — Never Outward — The 
Ways of Escape — The Christian Press — No Soft Sentimentalists 
Wanted — The Return of the Wanderer 435 



CHAPTER XLVI. 

INFLUENCE OF CLUBS. 

Men Gregarious — Herbs and Flowers — Secret Soceities — Two 
Specimens of Clubs — Profitable or Baleful Influences — The Test — 
The Home — Moral Bigamy — Domestic Shipwrecks — The Clubs Sub- 
stituted for the Home — Obituary Easily Written — Scions of Aristoc- 
racy — Influence a Man's Commercial Credit — Its Influence on One's 
Sense of Moral and Spiritual Obligation — Two Highways — Attacks 
the Best Men — The Large Admission Fee — Influence of Fathers 
Upon Their Sons — Sacrifice your Money Rather than your Soul. .446 

CHAPTER XLVII. 

HEALTH RESORTS. 

Watering Places — Piety Left at Home — Little Piety at Health 
Resorts — Hard to be Good — Elders and Deacons — Temptations — 
Baleful Influence of Horse Racing — The Habitues of Races — Dis- 
honor and Ruin — Statement of a Leading Sportsman — A Sacrifice of 
Physical Strength — A Poor Rule — Hasty and Life-long Alliances — 
Responsible for Many Domestic Infelicities — The Soft-headed Dude 



xviii 



CONTENTS. 



— The Frothy Young Woman— Baneful Literature — Intoxicating 
Beverages — Arm Yourself Against Temptation 458 

CHAPTER XLVIII. 

THE ROLLER SKATING CRAZE. 

The Lever — Balance Wheel— Other Wheels — Looking for a 
Healthful Amusement— The World's Temptations — The Theater- 
Does the Roller Skate Recreation Afford Healthful Amusement? — 
Yes, with Restrictions — Proper Precautions — One Hour's Exercise 
Daily — Great Possibilities — Vulgarity of Immodesty — A Chaperone — 
Well Dressed Men Flirts — Avoid Senseless Prolongation — Let the 
Law of the Parlor Dominate — A Craze Deplorable — Remember 
One's Youth — A Good Time — Solon's Law — Recreation an Aug- 
mentation o o 470 



CHAPTER XLIX. 

TOBACCO -AND OPIUM. 

The Herb— Yucatan its Birth Place— Nearly all Use It — A Poison 
— Truths Uttered Against the Evil — Terrific Unhealth — Depresses 
the Nervous System — Creates an Unnatural Thirst — The Drunkard's 
Grave Strewed with Tobacco Leaves — Witnesses — Incidents Related 
— Killed by Tobacco — The Ministry Use It — Unnecessary Expense — 
Both Sexes — A Brilliant Man — White Poppy — Its Age — The Opium 
Eater — God Does not Hear the Prayer of Such— Chloral — Extirpa- 
tion 484 



CHAPTER L. 

SOCIAL DISSIPATION. 

Dancing — The Round Dance — Dancing Universal — Ancient 
Dancing — Present Custom — God Bless the Young — An Abetter of 
Pride — Physical Ruin — From Ball Room to Grave Yard — Usefulness 
Spoiled — A Belittling Process — An Incident — Earnest Work — A 
Vast Multitude Destroyed 497 



CHAPTER LI. 

SPIRITUALISM AN IMPOSTURE. 

Mystery — Communications Between This and the Next World — 
— Fingers of Superstition— Modern Spiritualism, an Old Doctrine — 
Necromancers of Old — God's Condemnation of Such — Undue Ad- 
vantage Taken — Remarkable Scholarship of Spirits — An Affair of 
Darkness — Ruin Physical Health — A Marital and Social Curse — The 
World with Spiritualism at the Head — Produces Insanity — False- 
hoods — Ruins Disciples and Mediums — Ruins the Soul 506 



CONTENTS. XIX 



CHAPTER LIE 



BOOKS. 



The Mighty Agency of the Printing Press — Its Chief Agency — 
Good Journalism — An Absorbing Question — Keep Aloof from Iniqui- 
tous — A List of Good Books — Three-fourths of Novels Published are 
Pernicious — False Pictures of Human Life — Indiscriminate Readers 
— How to Stem the Tide — Books that Corrupt the Imagination — 
George Sand — The Criminals of the Country — Apologetic for Crime 
— The Penalty — The Midnight Reader of Romances — Iniquitous 
Pictorials — A Plague Spot — The Power of a Bad Book — Examine 
Your Libraries — Charge! Charge!! 516 



CHAPTER LIII. 

ARE THEATERS 1 IMPROVING? 



Progression of the World — Great Actors — Secular Newspapers' 
Criticism — Depraved Advertisements — Importation of Bad Morals — 
Degenerate Players — An Awful Decadence — East Lynne— No Moral 
Elevation in the Modern Play — The Drama — An Echo of the 
Human Soul — Advice to Young Men — Freshen up your Work — 
Avoid Being Led into Sin 531 



CHAPTER LIV. 

ROMANCE OF CRIME. 

Halo Around Iniquity — The Fascinations Thrown around Crime 
— Fraud — Jim Fiske, the Peddler — An Irresistible Impression — Get- 
ing One's Hand In — The Dishonesties of Commercial Life — Gain 
Obtained by Iniquity Easily Lost — Trust Funds — Libertinism — 
Unfair Treatment of Female Sex — The Pulpit Must Awake — Assas- 
sination — Murder — Capital Punishment — Stand Independent of Evil 
Influences 541 



CHAPTER LV. 

ABUSE OF TRUST FUNDS. 

The Dead Treasurer — Accounts Squared — The Dishonest Fail- 
ures — An Appalling Fact— Responsibility of Officials — The Ineffi- 
cient Bank Director — An Orthodox Swindler — Loss of Public Confi- 
dence — Banks — National Blessings — An Epidemic — Borrowing — 
Wall Street Speculation — Sound the Alarm — Religion not a Church 
Delectation 552 



CHAPTER LVI. 



WALL STREET DEFALCATION. 

The Great Wall of 1685— Birthplace of the U. S. Government- 
Coronation and Burial of Fortunes — Extravagance — Elegances and 



XX 



CONTENTS. 



Refinements— No Iron Rule— Honest Failures Rare— Pay as You 
Go— Superfluities— Expenditures for Tobacco and Liquor— Cause of 
Pauperism— My Text at the Grave of a Swindler— Swindling the 
Physician and Undertaker— Cause of God Impoverished— Keep Your 
Credit Good 563 



SECTION IV. 
COALS FOR THE NATIONAL ARENA. 



CHAPTER LVII. 

NATIONAL RUIN. 

Tomb of a Dead Empire— Destruction of Babylon— Mortality 
among Nations — A Call of the Roll — Political Bribery — Legitimate 
Expenses— Purchase of Suffrage — Solidifying of Sections — Low 
State of Public Morals— The Millionaires of California — Son of 
Cresus — How to Save the Nation — Who Shall Possess this- Nation? 
Christ or Satan?— Who Shall Decide It? 575 



CHAPTER LVIII. 

EASY DIVORCE. 

Infelicitous Homes — Divorce — Free Love Advocates — Mormon- 
is"m — A Positive Law Now on the Statute Books — A Pustulous Lit- 
erature — The Laws of the States — The Record by States — Easy 
Divorce and Dissoluteness Twin Brothers — What we Want — Dissat- 
isfaction no Cause for Divorce — Constitutional Amendment — Make 
Divorce Difficult — Rigorous Laws — A Divine Rage Against all 
Enemies of the Marriage State — Paradise Regained 587 



CHAPTER LIX. 

THE ARCH FIEND OF THE NATIONS. 

Noah Introduced the Deluge of Drunkenness — Uhhealthful Stim- 
ulants — The Arch-Fiend's Cauldron of Temptation — Greatest Evil of 
this Nation — Statistics — Born with a Thirst for Strong Drink — The 
Last Will of the Drunkard — Bitters — Circulars of a Brewers' Associ- 
ation — A National Evil — Suffering Mothers and Children — Death's 
Hand — The Drunkard's Home — The Boast of Protagoras— Political 
Parties Afraid — The Church — Teetotalism coo 



CONTENTS. 



xxi 



CHAPTER LX. 

THE DEMAND OF GOD AND CIVILIZATION. 

Political Parties — Mormonism — A Great Evil — Necessity of Im- 
mediate Settlement of the Question — Bigamy Punished — Polygamy 
Unpunished — A Plank Anti-Mormonistic Wanted — Immigration of 
Mormons — Intermarriage of Nationalities — What Are We Doing — 
What Is Demanded—The Platforms of Political Parties— God's 
Country — Prayer Answered — Four Doxologies 613 

CHAPTER LXI. 

BOSSISM. 

The Village Boss — Slavery of American Politics — Official Pat- 
ronage — No Peril— No Crisis— The Old Lion — Party Independence 
Advocated — Good Example — Cry Partisanship — Malediction of Public 
Men — Public Life — A Respector of the Christian Religion — Chris- 
tianity in Politics — The Gospel to Be Dominant — The Brightest Day 
in our History , 624 

CHAPTER LXIL 

THE CHRISTIANIZED VOTE. 

The Sacred Chest — Holds the Fate of the Nation — Ancient Forms 
of Voting — First Introduction of Ballot-Boxes — The American Ark 
of the Covenant — Its Curses — Ignorance— Spurious Voting — Intimi- 
dation — Bribery — Defamation of Character— Opinions of Political 
Opponents — The Rowdy and Drunken Caucus — Low Politics — The 
Remedy — Property Qualification — Thorough Moralization and Chris- 
lianization 635 

CHAPTER LXIII. 

CAPITAL AND LABOR. 

Greatest War of the World — Strikes — Pacification a Failure — 
Folly of Crying Out against the Rich — Or by Cynical and Unsym- 
pathetic Treatment of the Laboring Classes — Violence — The Golden 
Rule Applied to Both — The Sermon Olivetic— Anecdote of Wash- 
ington — Supply and Demand — Henry Clay — The Greatest Friend to 
Capital and Labor 647 

CHAPTER LXIV. 

THE MORAL CHARACTER OF CANDIDATES. 

Wreck of Arabia Petrsea — The Decalogue — The Christly Rule — 
Statements of Red-Hot Partisanship — No Especial Liberty Conferred 
— Unchastity — A Moral Leper — One Sin Followed by Others — All 
Are Imperfect — The Man to Select as a Candidate 660 



XXII 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER LXV. 

RULERS. 

Morals of a Nation Seldom Higher than the Virtue of the Rulers 
— American Rulers Superior to all other Nations — Public Wicked- 
ness — Incompetency for Office — Intemperance — Defeats Legislation 
— Defeated our Armies — Bribery — Not Wholly American — Ras- 
cality Among Legislatures — Revolution Ahead— Bonus — Stand 
Aloof— Faithfulness at the Ballot-Box — Evangelize the People — Per- 
sonal Responsibility 667 

CHAPTER LXVI. 

DEDICATORY PRAYER. 



Delivered at the Opening of the New Orleans Exposition, De- 
cember 16, 1884 678 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE, D. D. 



Thomas De Witt Talmage was born on the 7th 
of January, 1832, in the village of Bound Brook, 
Somerset County, N. J. His father was a farmer, 

and a man of much vigor and consistency of charac- 
ter ; his mother a woman of energy, hopefulness and 
equanimity. 

Both parents were marked in their characteristics, 
and their differences blended in a common life ren- 
dered their home one of harmony, consecration, be- 
nignance and cheerfulness. The father won the 
confidence and the honors a rigid, common-sense, 
truly American community had to yield. The 
mother was the counseling, quietly provident force 
which made her a helpmeet indeed, and her home 
the center and sanctuary of the sweetest influences. 
The family was a deeply religious one. 

The now far-famed De Witt said on August 12, 
1885, a t the " Faith Cure " Rooms, Bethshan, Lon- 
don : — 

" I tell you that I believe in prayer because there 
is something in the ancestral line that makes me be- 
lieve. My grandfather and grandmother went to a 
great revival meeting in Baskingridge, New Jersey, 

25 



26 BIOGRAPHY. 

and they were so impressed with the religious service 
that they went home and said, If we could only have 
our children converted, if we could only have this 
great influence in our family ! That night all the 
young folks were to go off to a very gay party. 
Grandmother said, ' Now, when you are all ready for 
the party come into my room, as I have a word to 
say to you.' She was somewhat of an invalid, not 
able to get about much. The children came into the - 
room where she sat, and she said, ' Now you are go- 
ing to the party, going to have a very gay time. I 
want you to know that all the time you are there 
your mother is praying for you, and that we will 
kneel and pray for you until you come back.' They 
all went to the gay party, and, as may be well sup- 
posed, did not have a very good time. They knew 
their mother was praying for them. Grandmother 
went to bed, and the next morning very early she 
heard crying and sobbing in the room below. It was 
one of her little party crying to God for mercy, seek- 
ing a new heart, wanting to act on the Christian life. 
My Aunt Phcebe said to grandfather, ' Go down and 
find what is the matter ; go and hunt up Samuel — he 
is gone to the barn ; he feels worse than I do/ 
Grandfather went to the barn and found Samuel 
there kneeling and crying to God for mercy. He 
told him the way of salvation, so that he became a 
minister of Jesus Christ, and there was no man more 
useful in America during the century than he. Then 



BIOGRAPHY. 27 

Samuel said, 4 Go to the wagon-house ; David is there.' 
Grandfather went to the wagon-house. There was 
David, afterward my own father. He told David 
the way to the cross. David became a Christian. 
David, then a young man, had some one to whom he 
was affianced at the foot of the lane, not far off — 
Catherine Van Nest, afterward my mother. He told 
the story of the cross to her, and she became a Chris- 
tian. A great awakening resulted as this story went 
round the neighborhood, and people heard what 
things were going on in Mr. Talmage's family. 
Why, they were all getting converted, and the whole 
family were converted to God. And finally, as many 
as two hundred and eighty from that neighborhood 
stood up in one church to profess Christ. That story 
lingered in my mother's mind until she made a cove- 
nant, after her children were born, with five of her 
neighbors, to meet and pray one afternoon of each 
week for the salvation of her household. These five 
mothers met. I did not hear this story till after 
my mother's death. Nobody knew why these five 
persons met, there was a sort of mystery about it. 
Sometimes the question was put, 1 Mother, where are 
you going?' She used to answer, ' I am just going 
off a little while.' They met to pray for their chil- 
dren ; they prayed until they were all converted, my- 
self the last. Oh ! I believe in prayer. I believe you 
can get just what you ask of God if it is good for 
you. This story has no end," 



28 BIOGRAPHY. 

From a period ante-dating the Revolution, the an- 
cestors of our subject were members of the Reformed 
Dutch Church, in which the father of Dr. Talmage 
was the leading lay office-bearer through a life ex- 
tended beyond fourscore years, and of his numerous 
family, four sons are ministers of the Gospel, of 
whom our subject is the youngest. The story of his 
life is a simple one. He became a Christian before 
he was twenty ; took the course of study preparatory 
to college, much the same as other young men, and 
was graduated at the New York University, in 1853. 
His earliest preference was the law, the study of 
which he pursued for a year after his graduation, but 
the unrest within him, the voice of which soon be- 
came, " Woe is me if I preach not the Gospel," turned 
his steps toward the ministry, and he entered the New 
Brunswick, (N. J.,) Theological Seminary preparatory 
thereto. This step was extremely gratifying to his 
parents, and thereby one of their fondest hopes was 
realized, although they had not urged the course. 
He was plainly led of the Lord, and not man. The 
faculties which would have made him one of the 
greatest jury advocates of the age, thus were pre- 
served for the saving of the souls of men, and "He 
leadeth me," was written in living letters of light 
over the entrance to his lifework. 

The first years of his ministerial life seem to have 
been disciplinary — initial steps to his great mission, 
that of the pastorate of the Church of the Brooklyn 



BIOGRAPHY. 29 

Tabernacle. His first settlement was at Belleville, 
New Jersey. For three years he there underwent 
an excellent practical education in the conventional 
ministry. His congregation was one of the most 
cultivated and exacting in the rural regions of that 
sterling little State. It was known to be about the 
oldest society of Protestantism in New Jersey. Its 
records, as preserved, run back over two hundred 
years, but it is known to have had a strong life the 
larger part of a century or more. Its structure is 
regarded as one of the finest of any country congre- 
gation in the United States. The value (and the 
limits) of sterotyped preaching, and what he* did not 
know, came as an instructive and disillusionizing force 
to the theological tyro of Belleville. There also 
came and remained, strong friendships, inspiring re- 
vivals, and sacred counsels. 

By natural promotion, three years at Syracuse suc- 
ceeded three at Belleville. That cultivated, critical 
city furnished Mr. Talmage the value of an audience, 
in which professional men predominate in influence. 
His preaching there grew tonic and free. As Mr. 
Pitt advised a young friend, he ''risked himself." 
The church grew from few to many — from a state of 
coma to robust life. The preacher learned to go to 
school to humanity and his own heart. The lessons 
they taught him agreed with what was boldest and 
most compelling in the spirit of the revealed Word. 
But those whose claims were sacred to him, found 



30 BIOGRAPHY. 

the saline climate of Syracuse a cause of unhealth. 
Otherwise it is likely that one of the most delightful 
regions in the United States for men of letters who 
equally love nature and culture — Central New 
York — would have been the home of Mr. Talmage 
for life. 

From Syracuse he went to Philadelphia, where he 
spent seven years. Here his powers got "set." He 
learned what he could best do. He had the courage 
of his consciousness, and he did it. Previously, he 
might have felt it incumbent upon him to give to 
pulpit traditions the homage of compliance, though 
at Syracuse, "the more excellent way" — any man's 
own way, provided he have the divining gift of 
genius and the nature attune to all high sympathies 
and purposes — had in glimpses come to him. He 
realized that it was his duty and mission in the world 
to make it hear the gospel. The church was not to 
him a select few, an organization, a monopoly. It was 
meant to be the conqueror and transformer of the 
world. For seven years he wrought with much suc- 
cess on this theory, all the time realizing that his 
plans could come to fullness only under conditions 
that enabled him to build from the bottom up, an or- 
ganization which could get nearer the masses, and 
which would have no precedents to hamper it, and 
no traditional ghosts to stand in its pathway. At the 
end of this time he was called simultaneously to 
three churches — one in San Francisco, one in Chi- 



BIOGRAPHY. 3 1 

cago, and one in Brooklyn. That in Brooklyn was 
poor ; it was on the eve of dissolution ; it possessed 
but nineteen male members ; its need was greatest, 
its power was least. To Brooklyn he went, and 
from being the leading preacher in Philadelphia, he 
became the leading preacher in the world. 

His work here is known by all. It began in a 
cramped brick rectangle, capable of holding 1200. In 
less than two years that was exchanged for an iron 
structure, with raised seats, the interior curved like 
a horseshoe, the pulpit a platform bridging the ends. 
It held 3,000 persons. It lasted just long enough to 
revolutionize church architecture in cities into har- 
mony with common sense. Smaller duplicates of it 
started in every quarter, three in Brooklyn, two in 
New York, one in Montreal, one in Louisville, any 
number in Chicago, two in San Francisco, and like 
numbers abroad. Then it was burned, and the pres- 
ent stately and sensible structure rose in its place. 
Gothic, of brick and stone, cathedral-like above, am- 
phitheatre-like below, it seats 5,000 persons, and it is 
said that 7,000 can be accommodated within its walls. 

In a large sense the people built these edifices. 
Their architects were Leonard Vaux and John Welch 
respectively. It is sufficiently indicative to say in 
general of Dr. Talmage's work in the Tabernacle, 
that his audiences are always as many as the place 
will hold ; that twenty-three papers in Christendom 
statedly publish his entire sermons and Friday night 



32 BIOGRAPHY. 

discourses, exclusive of the dailies of the United 
States ; that the papers girdle the globe, being pub- 
lished in London, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, 
Belfast, Toronto, Montreal, St. Johns, Sidney, Mel- 
bourne, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Raleigh, 
Kansas City, New York, and many other places. No 
other preacher addresses so many constantly. The 
words of no other preacher were ever before carried 
by so many types, or carried so far. He has three con- 
tinents for a church, and the English-speaking world 
for a congregation. To pulpit labors of this respon- 
sibility should be added considerable pastoral work, 
the conduct of the Lay College, and constantly recur- 
ring lecturing and literary work, to fill out the public 
life of a very busy man. 

The judgment of his generation will be divided 
upon him just as that of the next will not. That he 
is a topic in every newspaper is much more signifi- 
cant than the fact of what treatment it gives him. 
Only men of genius are universally commented on. 
That the universality of the comment makes friends 
and foes proves the fact of genius. This is what is 
impressive. As for the quality of the comment, it 
will, in nine cases out of ten, be much more a revela- 
tion of the character behind the pen which writes it 
than a true view or review of the man. It can be 
truly said that while secular criticism in the United 
States favorably regards our subject in proportion to 
its intelligence and uprightness, the judgment of 



BIOGRAPHY. 33 

foreigners on him has long been an index to the judg. 
ment that is beginning to prevail here. No other 
American is read so much or so constantly abroad. 

Previous to his visit to Europe, in the summer of 
1885, he had declined all invitations to preach or lec- 
ture, as he needed rest, but some friendly pressure 
induced him to change his determination. The ser- 
mon he preached in London was delivered in the 
celebrated Wesleyan Chapel, behind which is the 
grave of John Wesley, and in front of which is Bun- 
hill Burial Ground, where lie the bones of John 
Bunyan, Isaac Watts, Daniel DeFoe, and Home 
Tooke. The preacher referred in his sermon to this 
hallowed ground. The Chapel was crowded to suf- 
focation. During the indoor services several thou- 
sand people stood in the front graveyard and in the 
street, impeding travel, and awaiting Dr. Talmage 
outside. * After the regular service he came into the 
church porch and addressed the multitude in full 
voice, and then with a smiling face gave out a stirring 
hymn, after singing which the populace made the 
policemen happy by again freeing the thoroughfare. 

Later in the season he preached in the United 
Presbyterian Synod Hall, Edinburgh, the service be- 
ginning at half-past two o'clock. Long before mid- 
day people desirous of being present began to assem- 
ble at the main entrance, and on account of the 
number who had arrived by twelve o'clock it was 
resolved to open the doors. In less than an hour the 



34 BIOGRAPHY. 

spacious building was filled in every part, all the 
passages and some of the windows even being 
occupied. The doors were closed shortly after one 
o'clock, those outside in Castle Terrace, numbering 
several thousands, being informed by means of bills 
which were exhibited, that the hall was full. The 
crowd continued to increase as time wore on, very 
much disappointment evidently being felt at being 
unable to gain admission. About two o'clock, how- 
ever, an intimation that Dr. Talmage would in the 
course of the afternoon address the gathering in Cas- 
tle Terrace seemed to afford relief. Meanwhile, sev- 
eral of Sankey's hymns were being sung inside by a 
choir, aud shortly before the appointed time for the 
commencement of the services, Dr. Talmage made 
his appearance on the platform, accompanied by Mrs. 
Talmage, and their son and two daughters. After 
devotional exercises — Professor Calderwood having 
engaged in prayer — Dr. Talmage gave out as his 
text, " I will show wonders in the heavens and in the 
earth." (Joel 2 : 30.) 

At the close of the proceedings Dr. Talmage shook 
hands with as many of the people as could get near 
him, but the crowd pressed forward in such a way 
that those in the front ranks were crushed to an un- 
comfortable degree, and this put a temporary check 
upon the leave-taking. Dr. Talmage then re-entered 
the building, and made his way to the rear of the 
hall, where a cab was in waiting for himself and fam- 



BIOGRAPHY. - 35 

* ily. Upon his appearance a crowd rapidly assembled, 
eager to shake hands with him, and crowded around 
the cab in such a way that it could not move until 
the police cleared a passage. A few gentlemen 
jumped upon the cab steps, ladies got their dresses 
soiled with mud by rubbing against the wheels, and 
some more adventurous than others, got their toes 
crushed by the wheels. Dr. Talmage then stood and 
shook hands over the back of the cab as hard as he 
was able, and it was not until Lothian Road was 
reached that the efforts of the police in keeping back 
the crowd were no longer needed. 

His extraordinary imagination, 'earnestness, des- 
criptive powers and humor, his great art in grouping 
and arrangement, his wonderful mastery of words to 
illumine and alleviate human conditions, and to inter- 
pret and inspire the harmonies of the better nature, 
are appreciated by all who can put themselves in 
sympathy with his originality of methods, and his 
high consecration of purpose. His manner mates 
with his nature. It is each sermon in action. He 
presses the eyes, hands, his entire body, into the ser- 
vice of the illustrative truth. Gestures are the ac- 
companiment of what he says. As he stands out 
before the immense throng, without a scrap of notes 
or manuscript before him, the effect produced cannot 
be understood by those who have never seen it. The 
solemnity, the tears, the awful hush, as though the 
audience could not breathe again, are oftimes painful. 



36 BIOGRAPHY. 

His voice is peculiar, not musical, but productive 
of startling, strong effects, such as characterize n*o 
preacher on either side of the Atlantic. His power 
to grapple an audience and master it from text to 
peroration has no equal. No man was ever less self- 
conscious in his work. He feels a mission of evange- 
lization on him as by the imposition of the Supreme. 
That mission he responds to by doing the duty that is 
nearest to him with all his might — as confident that 
he is under the care and order of a Divine Master as 
those who hear him are that they are under the 
spell of the greatest prose-poet that ever made the 
Gospel his song, and the redemption of the race the 
passion of his heart. 

Now in the full meridian of his powers, the arena 
of his life-work constantly widening before him, long 
may he be spared to enrich the world with the ema- 
nations of his genius, and to gather souls into the 
great Harvest-Home of the blessed Lord and Master. 

On the return of Dr. Talmage, September 14, 1885, 
a large number of his congregation chartered a 
steamer, and went down the Bay to meet him. On 
the 15th a formal welcome was given him in Brooklyn 
Tabernacle. 

Never in the history of the Brooklyn Tabernacle had 
there been such an immense audience. From seven 
o'clock, the hour at which the doors were opened, a 
steady stream of humanity poured into the church, 
filled the galleries and the main floor, crowded around 



BIOGRAPHY. 37 

the organ and choir, filled the many aisles and the 
wide, semi-circular corridor, and stretched far out 
into the street. It was not a gathering representative 
of any particular sect or church, but it was an assem- 
blage of the Christian people of Brooklyn. That it 
was from the Christian people of the city rather than 
from Dr. Talmage's congregation was demonstrated 
by the presence of the clergymen of different denom- 
inations who were there to welcome the great divine. 

The platform in the church was profusely decorated 
with flowers for the occasion. A large floral arch 
over six feet high, composed of white and red roses, 
astreax, smilax, camelias, acacia roses, carnations, and 
chrysanthemum roses, was stationed in the center of 
the platform beside the presiding officer's chair. On 
the arch were inscribed in red roses the words, 
" Welcome Home." On either side of the platform . 
were immense stands of gladioli palms, ferns, and 
other plants. Immediately above the organ was a 
large floral urn surmounted by red and white roses. 

At eight o'clock the sound of cheering was heard 
through the open door of the Tabernacle, Every 
head was turned doorward to catch a glimpse of 
Rev. Dr. Talmage as he entered the church. The 
dense crowd gave way on either side, and a storm of 
applause greeted him. The solemnity usually ob- 
served in a church was for a moment forgotten. The 
sound of the organ from which welled forth the 
strains of the well-known "Hail to the Chief" mingled 



38 BIOGRAPHY. 

with the applause, and the welcome was happy and 
most spontaneous. Dr. Talmage himself appeared to 
feel it as he walked down the aisle. 

The scene on the street during- the first part of the 
welcoming exercises was a remarkable one. The 
church was crowded in every part before eight 
o'clock, but long after that hour people kept coming 
toward the Tabernacle. When they found that en- 
trance was impossible they stood before the door. 
Soon the crowd increased to great dimensions, and 
extended nearly the length of the block. 

As he shook hands with the chairman, Rev Henry 
Ward Beecher, the plaudits of the assembled thou- 
sands reverberated through the vast < auditorium. 
The organ played " Home Again," and when the 
audience had sung " Praise God from whom all 
blessings flow," every one thought the welcome most 
complete. 

Addresses and music followed, and a welcome was 
given by the children of the infant class. A bright- 
eyed, fair-haired little girl, bearing a large basket of 
exquisite flowers, was conducted to the platform, and 
stepping to Dr. Talmage she made a pleasant little 
presentation speech, in which she expressed the 
pleasure of the Sunday-school that the beloved pas- 
tor was back again among his people. 

Dr. Talmage, in his response to the ovation, among 
other things, said : 

" We found everywhere that the best password in 



BIOGRAPHY. 39 

Europe is the word America. [Applause.] That 
opens all the doors, and that wins all the suavities. 
The fact is, they have their kindred on this side the 
sea. Brothers and sisters on that side, brothers and 
sisters on this side. They have forgotten all the un- 
pleasantness we had in 1776, and I have no doubt 
they will forgive us the fact that yesterday in the 
boat race the Puritan came in sixteen minutes before 
the Genesta. 

" Fellow-citizens of all callings and professions and 
trades, men of the law, men of the healing art, men 
of the editorial chair, men of merchandise, men of 
mechanism, and all the wives and mothers and sisters 
and daughters of the dear homes of Brooklyn, you 
cannot understand how deep an impression you have 
made upon me by the flowers and the music and the 
speeches and the genial appearance of your own 
countenances. You have put me under everlasting 
obligation, and have mortgaged me for industrious 
Christian service all my life long. Shoulder to 
shoulder let us stand in the great work of trying to 
make the world better, and then may we rest not 
very far apart in the adjoining gardens of the dead, 
and may God grant us all to rise in the resurrection 
of the just, when the heavens are no more." 

Professor Simpson, of Edinburgh, who had been 
one of Dr. Talmage's hosts across the water, said in 
his address on this occasion : 

" Up to this particular moment I thought I was the 



40 BIOGRAPHY. 

most fortunate man in creation, because such a sight 
as this I don't know as it has ever been seen in 
America before ; it has not been seen, I believe, on 
my side of the Atlantic. We have no place in Edin- 
burgh where it was possible for the people who 
wanted to hear Dr. Talmage to get near him. I ven- 
tured myself that Sabbath afternoon, having with me 
some of my own family and a daughter of the Lord 
Mayor of London, all very eager to hear your great 
pastor ; but I could not get within a street's length 
of the place where the crowds were gathered around 
the doors. We counted ourselves extremely fortu- 
nate that he was good enough to come and take dinner 
with us in our county house in Midlothian. At that 
dinner-table there was a little maid from the far-off 
highlands of Sutherlandshire who asked : 1 Is the Dr. 
Talmage who is to be at dinner to-day the great Dr. 
Talmage whose sermons we all read ? ' When she 
was told ' Yes,' she clapped her hands and said, ' I 
will write to my mother that I had the honor of wait- 
ing on Dr. Talmage.' From the highest to the low- 
est we hold his name in reverence and in love." 



PART I. 

Coalg for the Individual. 



CHAPTER I. 



BUSINESS LIFE. 

We are under the impression that the moil and tug 
of business life are a prison into which a man is 
thrust, or that it is an unequal strife where unarmed, 
a man goes forth to contend. 

Business life was intended of God for grand and 
glorious education and discipline, and if I shall be 
helped to say what I want to say, I shall rub some of 
the wrinkles of care out of your brow, and unstrap 
some of the burdens from your back. 

Business life was intended as a school of energy. 
God gives us a certain amount of raw material out of 
which we are to hew our character. Our faculties 
are to be reset, rounded, and sharpened up. Our 
young folks having graduated from school or college 
need a higher education, that which the rasping and 
collision of everyday life alone can effect. Energy is 
wrought out only in a fire. After a man has been in 
business activity ten, twenty, thirty years, his energy 
is not to be measured by weights, or plummets, or 
ladders. There is no height it cannot scale, and 
there is no depth it cannot fathom, and there is no 
obstacle it cannot thrash. 

Now, my brother, why did God put you in that 
school of energy? Was.it merely that you might be 
a yardstick to measure cloth, or a steelyard to weigh 
flour ? Was it merely that you might be better quali- 

43 



44 



BUSINESS LIFE. 



fied to chaffer and higgle? No. God placed you in 
that school of energy that you might be developed for 
Christian work. If the undeveloped talents in the 
Christian churches of to-day were brought out and 
thoroughly harnessed, I believe the whole earth 
would be converted to God in a twelvemonth. 
There are so many deep streams that are turning no 
mill-wheels, and that are harnessed to no factory- 
bands. 

Now, God demands the best lamb out of every 
flock. He demands the richest sheaf of every har- 
vest. He demands the best men of every generation. 
A cause in which Newton, and Locke, and Mansfield 
toiled, you and I can afford to toil in. Oh, for a fewer 
idlers in the cause of Christ, and for more Christian 
workers, men who shall take the same energy that 
from Monday morning to Saturday night they put 
forth for the achievement of a livelihood, or the 
gathering of a fortune, and on Sabbath days put it 
forth to the advantage of Christ's kingdom, and the 
bringing of men to the Lord. 

Dr. Duff visited, he said, in South Wales, and he 
saw a man who had inherited a great fortune. The 
man said to him : " I had to be very busy for many 
years of my life getting my livelihood. After a while 
this fortune came to me, and there has been no neces- 
sity that I toil since. There came a time when I said 
to myself, ' Shall I now retire from business, or shall 
I go on and serve the Lord in my worldly occupa- 
tion ? ' " He said : " I resolved on the latter, and I 
have been more industrious in commercial circles 
than I ever was before, and since that hour I have 
never kept a farthing for myself. I have thought it 
to be a great shame if I couldn't toil as hard for the 



BUSINESS LIFE. 



45 



Lord as I had toiled for myself, and all the products 
of my factories and my commercial establishments to 
the last farthing have gone for the building of Chris- 
tian institutions and supporting the Church of God." 
Oh, if the same energy put forth for the world could 
be put forth for God ! Oh, if a thousand men in 
these' great cities who have achieved a fortune could 
see it their duty now to do all business for Christ and 
the alleviation of the world's suffering! 

Business life is a school of patience. In your 
everyday life how many things to annoy and to dis- 
quiet ! Bargains will rub. Commercial men will 
sometimes fail to meet their engagements. Cash 
book and money drawer will sometimes quarrel. 
Goods ordered for a special emergency will come too 
late, or be damaged in the transportation. People 
intending no harm will go shopping without any 
intention of purchase, overturning great stocks of 
goods, and insisting that you break the dozen. More 
bad debts on the ledger. More counterfeit bills in 
the drawer. More debts to pay for other people. 
More meannesses on the part of partners in business. 
Annoyance after annoyance, vexation after vexation, 
and loss after loss. 

All that process will either break you down or 
brighten you up. It is a school of patience. You 
have known men under the process to become petu- 
lant, and choleric, and angry, and pugnacious, and 
cross, and sour, and queer, and they lost their cus- 
tomers, and their name became a detestation. Other 
men have been brightened up under the process. 
They were toughened by the exposure. They were 
like rocks, all the more valuable for being blasted. 
At first they had to choke down their wrath, at first 



46 BUSINESS LIFE. 

they had to bite their lip, at first they thought of 
some stinging retort they would like to make ; but 
they conquered their impatience. They have kind 
words now for sarcastic flings. They have gentle 
behavior now for unmannerly customers. They are 
patient now with unfortunate debtors. They have 
Christian reflections now for sudden reverses. 
Where did they get that patience ? By hearing a 
minister preach concerning it on Sabbath? Oh, no. 
They got it just where you will get it — if you ever 
get it at all — selling hats, discounting notes, turning 
banisters, plowing corn, tinning roofs, pleading 
causes. Oh, that amid the turmoil and anxiety and 
exasperation of everyday life you might hear the 
voice of God saying: " In patience possess your soul. 
Let patience have her perfect work." 

Business life is a school of useful knowledge. Mer- 
chants do not read many books, and do not study 
lexicons. They do not dive into profounds of learn- 
ing, and yet nearly all through their occupations 
come to understand questions of finance, and politics^ 
and geography, and jurisprudence, and ethics. Busi- 
ness is a severe schoolmistress. If pupils will not 
learn she strikes them over the head and heart with 
severe losses. You put $5,000 into an enterprise. It 
is all gone. You say, " That is a dead loss." Oh, no. 
You are paying the schooling. That was only 
tuition, very large tuition — I told you it was a severe 
schoolmistress — but it was worth it. You learned 
things under that process you would not have learned 
in any other way. 

Traders in grain come to know something about 
foreign harvests ; traders in fruit come to know 
something about the prospects of tropical produc- 



BUSINESS LIFE. 



47 



tion ; manufacturers of American goods come to 
understand the tariff on imported articles ; publishers 
of books must come to understand the new law of 
copyright ; owners of ships must come to know winds 
and shoals and navigation ; and every bale of cotton, 
and every raisin cask, and every tea box, and every 
cluster of bananas is so much literature for a business 
man. Now, my brother, what are you going to do 
with the intelligence ? Do you suppose God put you 
in this school of information merely that you might 
be sharper in a trade, that you might be mor e sue 
cessful as a worldling? Oh, no; it was that you 
might take that useful information and use it for 
Jesus Christ. 

Can it be that you have been dealing with foreign 
lands and never had the missionary spirit, wishing 
the salvation of foreign people ? Can it be that you 
have become acquainted with all the outrages 
inflicted in business life, and that you have never 
tried to bring to bear that Gospel which is to extir- 
pate all evil and correct all wrongs, and illuminate all 
darkness and lift up all wretchedness, and save men 
for this world and the world to come ? Can it be 
that understanding all the intricacies of business you 
know nothing about those things which will last after 
all bills of exchange and consignments and invoices 
and rent rolls shall have crumpled up and been con- 
sumed in the fires of the last great day ? Can it be 
that a man will be wise for time, and a fool for 
eternity ? 

Business life is a school for integrity. No man 
knows what he will do until he is tempted. There 
are thousands of men who have kept their integrity 
merely because they never have been tested. A man 



48 BUSINESS LIFE. 

was elected treasurer of the State of Maine some 
years ago. He was distinguished for his honesty, 
usefulness and uprightness, but before one year had 
passed he had taken of the public funds for his own 
private use, and was hurfed out of office in disgrace. 
Distinguished for virtue before. Distinguished for 
crime after. You can call over the names of men 
just like that, in whose honesty you had complete 
confidence, but placed in certain crises of temptation 
they went overboard. 

Never so many temptations to scoundrelism as 
now. Not a law on the statute book but has some 
back door through which a miscreant can escape. 
Ah ! how many deceptions in the fabric of goods ; so 
much plundering in commercial life that if a man 
talk about living a life of complete commercial accu- 
racy there are those who ascribe it to greenness and 
lack of tact. More need of honesty now than ever 
before, tried honesty, complete honesty, more than 
in those times when business was a plain affair, and 
woolens were woolens, and silks were silks, and 
men were men. 

How many men do you suppose there are in com- 
mercial life who could say truthfully, " In all the sales 
I have ever made I have never overstated the value 
of goods ; in all the sales I have ever made I have 
never covered up an imperfection in the fabric ; of 
all the thousands of dollars I have ever made I have 
not taken one dishonest farthing ? " There are men, 
however, who can say it, hundreds who can say it, 
thousands who can say it. They are more honest 
than when they sold their first tierce of rice, or their 
first firkin of butter, because their honesty and integ- 
aity have been tested, tried and came out triumphant. 



BUSINESS LIFE. 



49 



But they remember a time when they could have 
robbed a partner, or have absconded with the funds 
of a bank, or sprung a snap judgment, or made a false 
assignment, or borrowed inimitably without any 
efforts at payment, or got a man into a sharp corner 
and fleeced him. But they never took one step on 
that pathway of hell fire. They can say their prayers 
without hearing the clink of dishonest dollars. They 
can read their Bible without thinking of the time 
when, with a lie on their soul in the Custom House, 
they kissed the book. They can think of death and 
the judgment that comes after it without any flinch- 
ing — that day when all charlatans and cheats and 
jockeys and frauds shall be doubly damned. It does 
not make their knees knock together, and it does not 
make their teeth chatter to read "as the partridge 
sitteth on eggs, and hatcheth them not ; so he that 
getteth riches, and not by right, shall leaye them in 
the midst of his days, and at his end shall be a fool.'' 

Oh, what a school of integrity business life is ! If 
you have ever been tempted to let your integrity 
cringe before present advantage, if you have ever 
wakened up in some embarrassment, and said : 
" Now, I'll step a little aside from the right path and 
no one will know it, and I'll come all right again; it is 
orjy once." Oh, that only once has ruined tens of 
thousands of men for this life, and blasted their souls 
for eternity. It is a tremendous school, business life, 
a school of integrity. 

There are men who fought the battle and gained 
the victory. People come out of that man's store, 
and they say : " Well, if there ever was a Christian 
trader, that is one." Integrity kept the books and 
waited on the customers. Light from the eternal 



5o 



BUSINESS LIFE. 



world flashed through the show windows. Love to 
God and love to man presided in that storehouse. 
Some day people going through the street notice 
that the shutters of the window are not down. The 
bar of that store door has not been removed. People 
say, " What is the matter ? " You go up a little 
closer, and you see written on the card of that win- 
dow : " Closed on account of the death of one of the 
firm." That day all through the circles of business 
there is talk about how a good man has gone. Boards 
of trades pass resolutions of sympathy, and churches 
of Christ pray, " Help, Lord, for the godly man 
ceaseth." He has made his last bargain, he has suf- 
fered his last loss, he has ached with the last fatigue. 
His children will get the result of his industry, or, if 
through misfortune there be no dollars left, they will 
have an estate of prayer and Christian example, 
which will be everlasting. Heavenly rewards for 
earthly discipline. There " the wicked cease from 
troubling, and the weary are at rest." 



CHAPTER II. 



GNATS AND CAMELS. 

A man after long observation has formed the sus- 
picion that in a cup of water he is about to drink 
there is a grub or the grandparent of a gnat. He 
goes and gets a sieve or strainer. He takes the water 
and pours it through the sieve in the broad light. He 
says : " I would rather do anything almost than drink 
this water until this larva be extirpated." This water 
is brought under inquisition. The experiment is suc- 
cessful. The water rushes through the sieve and 
leaves against the side of the sieve the grub or gnat. 
Then the man carefully removes the insect and drinks 
the water in placidity. But going out one day, and 
hungry, he devours a " ship of the desert," the camel, 
which the Jews were forbidden to eat. The gastro- 
nomer has no compunctions of conscience. He suffers 
from no indigestion. He puts the lower jaw under 
the camel's forefoot, and his upper jaw over the 
hump of the camel's back, and gives one swallow and 
the dromedary disappears forever. He strained out 
a gnat, he swallowed a camel. 

It is a very short bridge between a smile and a tear, 
a suspension bridge from eye to lip, and it is soon 
crossed over, and a smile is sometimes just as sacred 
as a tear. There is as much religion, and I think a 
little more, in a spring morning than in a starless 
midnight. Religious work without any humor or 

5i 



52 GNATS AND CAMELS. 

wit in it is a banquet with a side of beef and that raw, 
and no condiments, and no dessert succeeding. People 
will not sit down at such a banquet. By all means 
remove all frivolity and all pathos and all lightness 
and all vulgarity — strain them out through the sieve 
of holy discrimination ; but on the other hand, beware 
of that monster which overshadows the Christian 
Church to-day, conventionality, coming up from the 
Great Sahara Desert of EcClesiasticism, having on its 
back a hump of sanctimonious gloom, and vehe- 
mently refuse to swallow that camel. 

Oh, how particular a great many people are about 
the infinitesimals while they are quite reckless about 
the magnitudes. What did Christ say? Did He not 
excoriate the people in His time who were so careful 
to wash their hands before a meal, but did not wash 
their hearts? It is a bad thing to have unclean 
hands ; it is a worse thing to have an unclean heart. 
How many people there are in our time who are 
very anxious that after their death they shall be 
buried with their face toward the east, and not at all 
anxious that during their whole life they should face 
in the right direction so that tbey shall come up in 
the resurrection of the just whichever way they are 
buried. How many there are chiefly anxious that a 
minister of the Gospel shall come in the line of apos- 
tolic succession, not caring so much whether he 
comes from Apostle Paul or Apostle Judas, They 
have a way of measuring a gnat until it is larger than 
a camel. 

My subject photographs all those who are abhor- 
rent of small sins while they are reckless in regard to 
magnificent thefts. You will find many a merchant 
who, while he is so careful that he would not take a 



GNATS AND CAMELS. 



53 



yard of cloth or a spool of cotton from the counter 
without paying- for it, and who if a bank cashier 
should make a mistake and send in a roll of bills five 
dollars too much would dispatch a messenger in hot 
haste to return the surplus, yet who will go into a 
stock company in which after a while he gets control 
of the stock, and then waters the stock and makes 
$100,000 appear like $200,000. He only stole $100,- 
000 by the operation. Many of the men of fortune 
made their wealth in that way. 

One of those men, engaged in such unrighteous 
acts, that evening, the evening of the very day when 
he watered the stock, will find a wharf-rat stealing a 
Brooklyn Eagle from the basement doorway, and will 
go out and catch the urchin by the collar, and twist 
the collar so tightly the poor fellow cannot say that it 
was thirst for knowledge that led him to the dishon- 
est act, but grip the collar tighter and tighter, saying, 
" I have been looking for you a long while ; you stole 
my paper four or five times, haven't you ? you miser- 
able wretch." And then the old stock gambler, with 
a voice they can hear three blocks, will cry out : 
" Police, police ! " That same man, the evening of 
the day in which he watered the stock, will kneel 
with his family in prayers and thank God for the 
prosperity of the day, then kiss his children good- 
night with an air which seems to say, " I hope you 
will all grow up to be as good as your father ! " 

Prisons for sins insectile in size, but palaces for 
crimes dromedarian. No mercy for sins animalcule 
in proportion, but great leniency for mastodon in- 
iquity. A poor boy slily takes from the basket of a 
market woman a choke pear — saving some one else 
from the cholera — and you smother him in the horri- 



54 



GNATS AND CAMELS. 



ble atmosphere of Raymond Street Jail or New York 
Tombs, while his cousin, who has been skilful enough 
to steal $50,000 from the city, you will make him a 
candidate for the New York Legislature ! 

There is a great deal of uneasiness and nervous- 
ness now among some people in our time who have 
gotten unrighteous fortunes, a great deal of nervous- 
ness about dynamite. I tell them that God will put 
under their unrighteous fortunes something more ex- 
plosive than dynamite, the earthquake of his omnipo- 
tent indignation, It is time that we learn in America 
that sin is not excusable in proportion as it declares 
large dividends, and has outriders in equipage. Many 
a man is riding to perdition .postillion ahead, and 
lackey behind. To steal one copy of a newspaper is 
a gnat; to steal many thousands of dollars is a camel. 

There is many a fruit dealer who would not con- 
sent to steal a basket of peaches from a neighbor's 
stall, but who would not scruple to depress the fruit 
market, and as long as I can remember we have heard 
every summer the peach crop of Maryland is a fail- 
ure, and by the time the crop comes in the misrepre- 
sentation makes a difference of millions of dollars. A 
man who would not steal one peach basket steals fifty 
thousand peach baskets. 

Go down to the Mercantile Library, in the reading- 
rooms, and see the newspaper reports of the crops 
from all parts of the country, and their phraseology 
is very much the same, and the same men wrote 
them, methodically and infamously carrying out the 
huge lying about the grain crop from year to year 
and for a score of years. After a while there will be 
a " corner " in the wheat market, and men who had a 
contempt for a petty theft will burglarize the wheat 



GNATS AND CAMELS. 



55 



bin of a nation and commit larceny upon the Ameri- 
can corn-crib. And in this hot weather some of the 
men will sit in churches and in reformatory institu- 
tions trying- to strain out the small gnats of scoun- 
drelism while in their grain elevators and in their 
storehouses they are fattening huge camels which 
they expect after a while to swallow. 

Society has to be entirely reconstructed on this 
subject. We are to find that a sin is inexcusable in 
proportion as it is great. I know in our time the ten- 
dency is to charge religious frauds upon good men. 
They say, " Oh, what a class of frauds you have in 
the Church of God in this day," and when an elder 
of a church, or a deacon, or a minister of the Gospel, 
or a superintendent of a Sabbath-school turns out a 
defaulter, what display heads there are in many of 
the newspapers. Great primer type. Five line pica. 
"Another Saint Absconded," " Clerical Scoundrel- 
ism," " Religion at a Discount," " Shame on the 
Churches," while there are a thousand scoundrels 
outside the church to where there is one inside the 
church, and the misbehavior of those who never see 
the inside of a church is so great it is enough to 
tempt a man to become a Christian to get out of their 
company. But in all circles, religious and irreligious, 
the tendency is to excuse sin in proportion as it is 
mammoth. Even John Milton in his " Paradise Lost," 
while he condemns Satan, gives such a grand descrip- 
tion of him you have hard work to suppress your ad- 
miration. Oh, this straining out of small sins like 
gnats, and this gulping down great iniquities like 
tcamels. 

This subject does not give the picture of one or 
two persons, but is a gallery in which thousands of 



56 GNATS AND CAMELS. 

people may see their likenesses. For instance, all 
those people who, while they would not rob their 
neighbor of a farthing, appropriate the money and 
the treasure of the public. A man has a house to 
sell, and he tells his customer it is worth $20,000. 
Next day the assessor comes around, and the owner 
says it is worth $15,000. The government of the 
United States took off the tax from personal income, 
among other reasons because so few people would 
tell the truth, and many a man with an income of 
hundreds of dollars a day made statements which 
seemed to imply he was about to be handed over to 
the overseer of the poor. Careful to pay their pas- 
sage from Liverpool to New York, yet smuggling in 
their Saratoga trunk ten silk dresses from Paris and 
a half-dozen watches from Geneva, Switzerland, tell- 
ing the Custom House officer on the wharf, " There 
is nothing in that trunk but wearing apparel," and 
putting a five dollar gold piece in his hand to punc- 
tuate the statement. 

But let us all surrender to the charge. What an 
ado about things here. What poor preparation for a 
great eternity. As though a minnow were larger 
than a behemoth, as though a swallow took wider 
circuit than an albatross, as though a nettle were 
taller than a Lebanon cedar, as though a gnat were 
greater than a camel, as though a minute were longer 
than a century, as though time were higher, deeper, 
broader than eternity. 



CHAPTER III. 



THE INSIGNIFICANT. 

Trouble develops character. It was bereavement, 
poverty, and exile, that developed, illustrated, and 
announced to all ages the sublimity of Ruth's charac- 
ter. That is a very unfortunate man who has no 
trouble. It was sorrow that made John Bunyan the 
better dreamer, and Dr. Young the better poet, and 
O'Connell the better orator, and Bishop Hall the bet- 
ter preacher, and Havelock the better soldier, and 
Kitto the better encyclopaedist, and Ruth the better 
daughter-in-law. 

I once asked an aged man in regard to his pastor, 
who was a very brilliant man, '-Why is it that your 
pastor, so very brilliant, seems to have so little heart 
and tenderness in his sermons ?" "Well," he replied, 
"the reason is, our pastor has never had any trouble. 
When misfortune comes upon him, his style will be 
different." After awhile the Lord took a child out of 
that pastor's house ; and though the preacher was 
just as brilliant as he was before, oh, the warmth, the 
tenderness of his discourses ! The fact is, that trouble 
is a great educator. You see, sometimes a musician 
sit down at an instrument, and his execution is cold 
and formal, and unfeeling. The reason is that all his 
life he has been prospered. But let misfortune or 
bereavement come to that man, and he sits down to 
the instrument, and you discover the pathos in the 
first sweep of the keys. 

57 



5 8 



THE INSIGNIFICANT. 



Misfortune and trials are great educators. A 
young doctor comes into a sick-room where there is 
a dying child. Perhaps he is very rough in his pre- 
scription, and very rough in his manner, and rough 
in the feeling of the pulse, and rough in his answer 
to the mother's anxious question ; but years roll on, 
and there has been one dead in his own house ; and 
now he comes into the sick-room, and with tearful 
eye he looks at the dying child, and he says, "Oh, 
how this reminds me of my Charlie !" Trouble, the 
great educator. Sorrow — I see its touch in the 
grandest painting ; I hear its tremor in the sweetest 
song ; 1 feel its power in the mightiest argument. 

Grecian mythology said that the fountain of Hip- 
pocrene was struck out by the foot of the winged 
horse Pegasus. I have often noticed in life that the 
brightest and most beautiful fountains of Christian 
comfort and spiritual life have been struck out by the 
iron-shod hoof of disaster and calamity. I see Dan- 
iel's courage best by the flash of Nebuchadnezzar's 
furnace. I see Paul's prowess best when I find him 
on the foundering ship under the glare of the light- 
ning in the breakers of Melita. God crowns His 
children amid the howling of wild beasts, and the 
chopping of blood-splashed guillotine, and the crack- 
ling fires of martyrdom. It took the persecutions of 
Marcus Aurelius to develop Polycarp and Justin 
Martyr. It took the Pope's bull, and the cardinals' 
curse, and the world's anathema to develop Martin 
Luther. It took all the hostilities against the Scotch 
Covenanters and the fury of Lord Claverhouse to 
develop James Renwick, and Andrew Melville, and 
Hugh McKail, the glorious martyrs of Scotch history. 
It took the stormy sea, and the December blast, and 



THE INSIGNIFICANT. 



59 



the desolate New England coast, and the war-whoop 
of savages, to show forth the prowess of the Pilgrim 
Fathers — 

" When amid the storms they sang, 
And the stars heard, and the sea; 
And the sounding aisles of the dim wood 
Rang to the anthems of the free." 

It took all our past national distresses, and it takes 
all our present national sorrows, to lift up our nation 
on that high career where it will march long after the 
foreign aristocracies that have mocked, and the tyran- 
nies that have jeered, shall be swept down under 
the omnipotent wrath of God, who hates despotism, 
and who, by the strength of His own red right arm, 
will make all men free. And so it is individually, 
and in the ' family,- and in the church, and in the 
world, that through darkness, and storm, and trouble, 
men, women, churches, nations, are developed. 

I suppose there were plenty of friends for Naomi 
while she was in prosperity ; but of all her acquaint- 
ances, how many were willing to trudge off with her 
toward Judah, when she had to make that lonely 
, journey ? One — absolutely one. I suppose when 
Naomi's husband was living, and they had plenty of 
money, and all things went well, they had a great 
many callers; but I suppose that after her husband 
died, and her property went, and she got old and 
poor, she was not troubled very much with callers. 
All the birds that sang in the bower while the sun 
shone have gone to their nests, now the night has 
fallen. 

Oh, these beautiful sunflowers that spread out 
their color in the morning hour ; but they are always 
asleep when the" sun is going down ! Job had plenty 



6o 



THE INSIGNIFICANT. 



of friends when he was the richest man in Uz ; but 
when his property went, and the trials came, then 
there were none so much that pestered as Eliphaz, 
the Temanite, and Bildad, the Shuhite, and Zophar, 
the Naamathite. 

Life often seem to be a mere game, where the suc- 
cessful player pulls down all the other men into his 
own lap. Let suspicions arise about a man's char- 
acter, and he becomes like a bank in a panic, and all 
the imputations rush on him, and break down in a 
day that character which in due time would have had 
strength to defend itself. There are reputations that 
have been half a century in building, which go down 
under some moral exposure, as a vast temple is con- 
sumed by the touch of a sulphurous match. A hog 
can uproot a century plant. 

In this world, so full of heartlessness and hy- 
pocrisy, how thrilling it is to find some friend as 
faithful in days of adversity, as in days of prosperity ! 
David had such a friend in Hushai. The Jews had 
such a friend in Mordecai, who never forgot their 
cause. Paul had such a friend in Onesiphorus, who 
visited him in jail. Christ had such in the Marys, 
who adhered to Him on the cross. Naomi had such 
a one in Ruth, who cried out : " Entreat me not to 
leave thee, or to return from following after thee; 
for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou 
lodgest, I will lodge ; thy people shall be my people, 
and thy God my God ; where thou diest, will I die, 
and there will I be buried ; the Lord do so to me, and 
more also, if aught but death part thee and me." 

The paths which open in hardship and darkness 
often come out in places of joy. When Ruth started 
from Moab toward Jerusalem, to go'along with her 



THE INSIGNIFICANT. 



6l 



mother-in-law, I suppose the people said, " Oh, what 
a foolish creature to go away from her father's house, 
to go off with a poor old woman toward the land of 
Judah ! They won't live to get across the desert. 
They will be drowned in the sea, or the jackals of the 
wilderness will destroy them." It was a very dark 
morning when Ruth started off with Naomi ; but be- 
hold her in the harvest-field of Boaz, to be affianced 
to one of the lords of the land, and become one of 
the grandmothers of Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory. 
And so it often is that a path which often starts very 
darkly ends very brightly. 

When you started out for heaven, oh, how dark 
was the hour of conviction — how Sinai thundered, 
and devils tormented, and the darkness thickened! 
All the sins of your life pounced upon you, and it was 
the darkest hour you ever saw when you first found 
out your sins. After a while you went into the 
harvest-field of God's mercy ; you began to glean in 
the fields of divine promise, and you had more 
sheaves than you could carry, as the voice of God 
addressed you, saying : " Blessed is the man whose 
transgressions are forgiven, and whose sins are cov- 
ered." A very dark starting in conviction, a very 
bright ending in the pardon, and the hope, and the 
triumph of the Gospel. 

So, very often in our worldly business, or in our 
spiritual career, we start off on a very dark path. 
We must go. The flesh may shrink back, but there 
is a voice within, or a voice from above, saying: 
"You must go," and we have to drink the gall, and 
we have to carry the cross, and we have to traverse 
the desert, and we are pounded, and flailed of misrep- 
resentation and abuse, and we have to urge our way 



62 



THE INSIGNIFICANT. 



through ten thousand obstacles that have been slain 
by our own right arm. We have to ford the river, 
we have to climb the mountain, we have to storm the 
castle; but blessed be G.od, the day of rest and re- 
ward will come. On the tip-top of the captured bat- 
tlements we will shout the victory; if not in this 
world, then in that world where there is no gall to 
drink, no burdens to carry, no battles to fight. How 
do I know it? Know it! I know it because God 
says so. " They shall hunger no more, neither thirst 
any more, neither shall the sun light on them, nor any 
heat, for the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne 
shall lead them to living fountains of water, and God 
shall wipe all tears from their eyes." 

It was very hard for Noah to endure the scoffings 
of the people in his day, while he was trying to build 
the ark, and was every morning quizzed about his old 
boat that never would be of any practical use ; but 
when the deluge came, and the tops of the mountains 
disappeared like the backs of sea-monsters, and the 
elements, lashed up in fury, clapped their hands over 
a drowned world, then Noah in the ark, rejoiced in 
his own safety, and the safety of his family, and 
looked out on the wreck of a ruined earth. 

Christ, hounded of persecutors, denied a pillow, 
worse maltreated than the thieves on either side of 
the cross, human hate smacking its lips in satisfaction 
after it had been draining His last drop of blood, the 
sheeted dead bursting from the sepulchre at His cru- 
cifixion. Tell me, O Gethsemane and Golgotha, 
were there ever darker times than those? Like the 
booming of the midnight sea against the rock, the 
surges of Christ's anguish beat against the gates of 
eternity, to be echoed back by all the thrones of 



THE INSIGNIFICANT. 



heaven and all the dungeons of hell. But the day of 
reward comes for Christ ; all the pomp and dominion 
of this world are to be hung on His throne, un- 
crowned heads are to bow before Him on whose 
head are many crowns, and all the celestial worship 
is to come up at His feet like the humming of the 
forest, like the rushing of the waters, like the thun- 
derings of the seas, while all heaven, rising on their 
thrones, beat time with their scepters. " Hallelujah, 
for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth ! Hallelujah, 
the kingdoms of this world have become the king- 
doms of the Lord Jesus Christ ! " 

" That song of love, now low and far, 
Erelong shall swell from star to star; 
That light, the breaking day which tips 
•The golden-spired Apocalypse." 

Events which seem to be most insignificant may be 
momentous. Can you imagine anything more unim- 
portant than the coming ol a poor woman from Moab 
to Judah ? Can you imagine anything more trivial 
than the fact that this Ruth just happened to alight — 
as they say — just happened to alight on that field of 
Boaz? Yet all ages, all generations, have an interest 
in the fact that she was to become an ancestor of the 
Lord Jesus Christ, and all nations and kingdoms must 
look at that one little incident with a thrill of un- 
speakable and eternal satisfaction. So it is in your 
history and in mine ; events that you thought of no 
importance at all have been of very great moment. 
That casual conversation, that accidental meeting — 
you did not think of it again for a long while ; but 
how it changed all the phase of your life ! 

It seemed to be of no importance that Jubal in- 
vented rude instruments of music, calling them harp 



64 



THE INSIGNIFICANT. 



and organ, but they were the introduction of all the 
world's minstrelsy ; and as you hear the vibration of 
a stringed instrument, even after the fingers have 
been taken away from it, so all music now of lute 
and drum and cornet, are only the long-continued 
strains of Jubal's harp and Jubal's organ. It seemed 
to be a matter of very little importance that Tubal 
Cain learned the uses of copper and iron ; but that 
rude foundry of ancient days has its echo in the rat- 
tle of Birmingham machinery, and the roar and bang 
of factories on the Merrimac. 

It seemed to be a matter of no importance that 
Luther found a Bible in a monastery ; but as he 
opened that Bible, and the brass-bound lids fell back, 
they jarred everything, from the Vatican to the 
furthest convent in Germany, and the rustling of the 
wormed leaves was the sound of the wings of the 
angel of the Reformation. It seemed to be a matter 
of no importance that a woman, whose name has been 
forgotten, dropped a tract in the way of a very bad 
man by the name of Richard Baxter. He picked up 
the tract and read it, and it was the means of his sal- 
vation. In after days that man wrote a book called 
"The Call to the Unconverted," that was the means 
of bringing a multitude to God, among others, 
Philip Doddridge. Philip Doddridge wrote a book 
called "The Rise and Progress of Religion," which 
has brought thousands and tens of thousands into 
the kingdom of God, among others, the great Wil- 
berforce. Wilberforce wrote a book called " A 
Practical View of Christianity," which was the 
means of bringing a great multitude to Christ, among 
others, Legh Richmond. Legh Richmond wrote a 
tract called " The Dairyman's Daughter," which 



THE INSIGNIFICANT. 



65 



has been the means of the salvation of unconverted 
multitudes. And that tide of influence started from 
the fact that one Christian woman dropped a Chris- 
tian tract in the way of Richard Baxter — the tide of 
influence rolling on through Richard Baxter, through 
Philip Doddridge, through the great Wilberforce, 
through Legh Richmond, on, on, on, forever, forever ! 
So the insignificant events of this world seem, after 
all, to be most momentous. The fact that you came 
up that street or this street seemed to be of no im- 
portance to you, and the fact that you went inside of 
some church may seem to be a matter of very great 
insignificance to you, but you will find it the turning- 
point in your history. 

Behold Ruth toiling in the harvest-field under the. 
hot sun, or at noon taking plain bread with the 
reapers, or eating the parched corn which Boaz 
handed to her. The customs of society, of course, 
have changed, and without the hardships and expos- 
ure to which Ruth was subjected, every intelligent 
woman will find something to do. 

I know there is a sickly sentimentality on this sub- 
ject. In some families there are persons of no prac- 
tical service to the household or community ; and 
though there are so many woes all around about 
them in the world, they spend their time languishing 
over a new pattern, or bursting into tears at midnight 
over the story of some lover who shot himself ! They 
would not deign to look at Ruth carrying back the 
barley on her way home to her mother-in-law, Na- 
omi. All this fastidiousness may seem to do very 
well while they are under the shelter of their father's 
house ; but when the sharp winter of misfortune 
comes, what of these butterflies ? Persons under in- 



66 



THE INSIGNIFICANT. 



dulgent parentage may get upon themselves habits 
of indolence ; but when they come out into practical 
life, their soul will recoil with disgust and chagrin. 
They will feel in their hearts what the poet so 
severely satirized when he said : 

" Folks are so awkward, things so impolite, 
They're elegantly pained from morning until night." 

Through that gate of indolence, how many men 
and women have marched, useless on earth, to a de- 
stroyed eternity ! Spinola said to Sir Horace Vere: 
" Of what did your brother die ?" " Of. having noth- 
ing to do," was the answer. " Ah ! " said Spinola, 
" that's enough to kill any general of us." Oh, can 
it be possible in this world, where there is so much 
suffering to be alleviated, so much darkness to be en- 
lightened, and so many burdens to be carried, that 
there is any person who cannot find anything 
to do? 

Madame de Stael did a world of work in her time ; 
and one day, while she was seated amid instruments 
of music, all of which she had mastered, and amid 
manuscript books, which she had written, some one 
said to her, " How do you find time to attend to all 
these things ?" " Oh," she replied, " these are not 
the things I am proud of. My chief boast is in the 
fact that 1 have seventeen trades, by any one of which 
I could make a livelihood if necessary." And if in 
secular spheres there is so much to be done, in spir- 
itual work how vast the field ! How many dying all 
around about us without one word of comfort ! We 
want more Abigails, more Hannahs, more Rebeccas, 
more Marys, more Deborahs consecrated — body, 
mind, soul — to the Lord who bought them. 



THE INSIGNIFICANT. 



6/ 



Ruth, going into that harvest-field, might nave said : 
"There is a straw, and there is a straw, but what is a 
straw? I can't get any barley for myself or my 
mother-in-law out of these separate straws." Not so 
said beautiful Ruth. She gathered two straws, and 
put them together, and more straws, until she got 
enough to make a sheaf. Putting that down, she 
went and gathered more straws, until she had another 
sheaf, and another, and another, and another, and 
then she brought them all together, and she threshed 
them out, and she had an ephah of barley, nigh a 
bushel. Oh, that we might all be gleaners ! 

Elihu Burritt learned many things while toiling in 
a blacksmith's shop. Abercrombie, the world-re- 
nowned philosopher, was a philosopher in Scotland, 
and he got his philosophy, or the chiei part of it, 
while, as a physician, he was waiting for the door of 
the sick-room to open. Yet how many there are in 
this day who say they are so busy they have no time 
for mental or spiritual improvement ; the great duties 
of life cross the field like strong reapers, and carry 
off all the hours, and there is only here and there a 
fragment left, that is not worth gleaning. Ah, my 
friends, you could go into the busiest day and busiest 
w x eek of your life and find golden opportunities, 
which, gathered, might at last make a whole sheaf 
for the Lord's garner. It is the stray opportunities 
and the stray privileges which, taken up and bound 
together, and beaten out, will at last fill you with 
much joy. 

There are a few moments left worth the gleaning. 
Now, Ruth, to the field ! May each one have a meas- 
ure full and running over ! Oh, you gleaners, to the 
field ! And if there be in your household an aged 



68 



THE INSIGNIFICANT. 



one, or a sick relative that is not strong enough to 
come forth and toil in this field, then let Ruth take 
home to feeble Naomi this sheaf of gleanings: "He 
that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, 
shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing 
his sheaves with him." May the Lord God of Ruth 
and Naomi be our portion forever ! 



« 

CHAPTER IV. 



PAUL IN A BASKET. 

" Through a window in a basket was I let down 
by the wall." 

On what a slender tenure great results hang. The 
ropemaker who twisted that cord fastened to that 
lowering basket never knew how much would 
depend on the strength of it. How if it had been 
broken and the apostle's life had been dashed out? 
What would have become of the Christian Church? 
All that magnificent missionary work in Pamphilia, 
Cappadocia, Galatia, Macedonia, would never have 
been accomplished. All his writings that make up 
so indispensable and enchanting a part of the New 
Testament would never have been written. The 
story of resurrection would never have been so 
gloriously told as he told it. The example of heroic 
and triumphant endurance at Philippi, in the Medi- 
terranean euroclydon, under flagellation and at his 
beheading, would not have kindled the courage of 
ten thousand martyrdoms. But that rope, holding 
basket, how much depended on it? So again and 
again, great results have hung on what seemed 
slender circumstances. 

Did ever ship of many thousand tons crossing the 
sea have such important passenger as had once a 
boat of leaves from taffrail to stern, only three or four 
feet, the vessel made waterproof by a coat of bitu- 

6 9 



yo PAUL IN A BASKET. 

men, and floating on the Nile with the infant law- 
giver of the Jews on board ? What if some crocodile 
should crunch it? What if some of the cattle wading 
in for a drink should sink it ? Vessels of war some- 
times carry forty guns looking through the port- 
holes, ready to open battle. But that tiny craft on 
the Nile seems to be armed with all the guns of 
thunder that bombarded Sinai at the law-giving. 
On how fragile craft sailed how much of historical 
importance ! 

The parsonage at Ep worth, England, is on fire in 
the night, and the father rushed through the hallway 
for the rescue of his children. Seven children are 
out and safe on the ground, but one remains in the 
consuming building. That one wakes, and finding 
his bed on fire, and the building crumbling, comes 
to the window, and two peasants make a ladder of 
their bodies, one peasant standing on the shoulder of 
the other, and down the human ladder the boy de- 
scends — John Wesley. If you would know how 
much depended on that ladder of peasants, ask the 
millions of Methodists on both sides of the sea. Ask 
their mission stations all around the world. Ask 
their hundreds of thousands already ascended to join 
their founder, who would have perished but for the 
living stairs of peasants' shoulders. 

An English ship stopped at Pitcairn Island and 
right in the midst of surrounding cannibalism and 
squalor, the passengers discovered a Christian colony 
of churches, and schools, and beautiful homes, and 
highest style of religion and civilization. For fifty 
years no missionary and no Christian influence had 
landed there. Why this oasis of light amid a desert 
of heathendom ? Sixty years before, a ship had met 



PAUL IN A BASKET. 



71 



disaster, and one of the sailors, unable to save any- 
thing else, went to his trunk and took out a Bible 
which his mother had placed there, and swam ashore, 
the Bible held in his teeth. The Book was read on 
all sides, until the rough and vicious population were 
evangelized, and a church was started, and an enlight- 
ened commonwealth established, and the world's his- 
tory has no more brilliant page than that which tells 
of the transformation of a nation by one book. It 
did not seem of much importance whether the sailor 
continued to hold the book in his teeth or let it fall 
in the breakers, but upon what small circumstance 
depended what mighty results ! 

There are no insignificances in our lives. The 
minutest thing is part of a magnitude. Infinity is 
made up of infinitesimals. Great things an aggrega- 
tion of small things. Bethlehem manger pulling on 
a star in the eastern sky. One book in a drenched 
sailor's mouth the evangelization of a multitude. 
One boat of papyrus on the Nile freighted with events 
for all ages. The fates of Christendom in a basket 
let down from a window on the wall. What you do, 
do well. If you make a rope make it strong and 
true, for you know not how much may depend on 
your workmanship. 

If you fashion a boat let it be water-proof, for you 
know not who may sail in it. If you put a Bible in 
the trunk of your boy as he goes from home, let it be 
heard in your prayers, for it may have a mission as 
far-reaching as the book which the sailor carried in 
his teeth to the Pitcairn beach. The plainest man's 
life is an island between two eternities — eternity past 
rippling against his shoulders, eternity to come 
touching his brow. The casual, the accidental, that 



7? PAUL IN A BASKET. 

which merely happened so are parts of a great plan, 
and the rope that lets the fugitive apostle from the 
Damascus wall is the cable that holds to its mooring 
the ship of the Church in the northeast storm of the 
centuries. 

Again, notice unrecognized and unrecorded ser- ' 
vices. Who spun that rope? Who tied it to the 
basket ? Who steadied the illustrious preacher as he 
stepped into it? Who relaxed not a muscle of the 
arm or dismissed an anxious look from his face until 
the basket touched the ground and discharged its 
magnificent cargo? Not one of their names has 
come to us, but there was no work done that day in 
Damascus or in all the earth compared with the im- 
portance of their work. What if they had in the 
agitation tied a knot that could slip ? What if the 
sound of the mob at the door had led them to say : 
" Paul must take care of himself, and we will take 
care of ourselves." No, no ! They held the rope, and 
in doing so did more for the Christian Church than 
any thousand of us will ever accomplish. But 
God knows and has made eternal record of their 
risky undertaking. And they know. 

How exultant they must have felt when they read 
his letters to the Romans, to the Corinthians, to the 
Galatians, to the Ephesians, to the Philippians, to the 
Colossians, to the Thessalonians, to Timothy, to 
Titus, to Philemon, to the Hebrews, and when they 
heard how he walked out of prison with the earth- 
quake unlocking the door for him, and took command 
of the Alexandrian corn-ship when the sailors were 
nearly scared to death, and preached a sermon that 
nearly shook Felix off his judgment seat. I hear the 
men and women who helped him down through the 



PAUL IN A BASKET. 



73 



window and over the wall talking in private over the 
matter, and saying : " How glad I am that we 
effected that rescue ! In coming times others may 
get the glory of Paul's work, but no one shall rob us 
of the satisfaction of knowing that we held the 
rope." 

There are said to be about sixty thousand ministers 
of religion in this country. About fifty thousand I 
warrant came from early homes which had to strug- 
gle for the necessaries of life. The sons of rich 
bankers and merchants generally become bankers 
and merchants. The most of those who become 
ministers are the sons of those who had terrific 
struggle to get their every-day bread. The colleg- 
iate and theological education of that son took every 
luxury from the parental table for eight years* The 
other children were more scantily appareled. 

The son at college every little while got a bundle 
from home. In it were the socks that mother had 
knit, sitting up late at night, her sight not as good as 
once it was. And there, also, were some delicacies 
from the sister's hand for the voracious appetite of a 
hungry student. The father swung the heavy cradle 
through the wheat, the sweat rolling from his chin 
bedewing every step of the way, and then sitting 
down under the cherry-tree at noon thinking to him- 
self : "I am fearfully tired, but it will pay if I can 
once see that boy through college, and if I can know 
that he will be preaching the Gospel after I am dead." 
The younger children want to know why they can't 
have this and that, as others do, and the mother says : 
"Be patient, my children, until your brother gradu- 
ates, and then you shall have more luxuries, but we 
must see that boy through." 



74 



PAUL IN A BASKET. 



The years go by, and the son has been ordained, 
and is preaching the glorious Gospel, and a great re- 
vival comes, and souls by scores and hundreds accept 
the Gospel from the lips of that young preacher, and 
father and mother, quite old now, are visiting the 
son at the village parsonage, and at the close of a 
Sabbath of mighty blessing, father and mother retire 
to their room, the son lighting the way and asking 
them if he can do anything to make them more com- 
fortable, saying if they want anything in the night 
just to knock on the wall. And then, all alone, 
father and mother talk over the gracious influences 
of the day, and say: "Well, it was worth all we 
went through to educate that boy. It was a hard 
pull, but we held on till the work was done. The 
world may not know it, but, mother, we held the 
rope, didn't we?" And the voice, tremulous with 
joyful emotion, responds: "Yes father, we held the 
rope. I feel my work is done. Now, Lord, lettest 
thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have 
seen thy salvation." "Pshaw!" savs the father, "I 
never felt so much like living in my life as now. I 
want to see what that fellow is going on to do, he 
has begun so well." 

O men and women, you brag sometimes how you 
have fought your way in the world, but I think there 
have been helpful influences that you have never 
fully acknowledged. Has there not been some influ- 
ence in your early or present home that the world 
can not see? Does there not reach to you from 
among the New England hills, or from Western prai- 
rie, or from Southern plantation, or from English, or 
Scottish, or Irish home, a cord of influence that has 
kept you right when you would have gone astray, 



PAUL IN A BASKET. 



75 



but which, after you had made a crooked track, re- 
called you ? The rope may be as long- as thirty years, 
or five hundred miles long, or three thousand miles 
long, but hands that went out of mortal sight long 
ago, still hold the rope. 

You want a very swift horse, and you need to 
rowel him with sharpest spurs, and to let the reins 
lie loose upon the neck, and to give a shout to a racer, 
if you are going to ride out of reach of your mother's 
prayers. Why, a ship crossing the Atlantic in seven 
days can't sail away from that ! A sailor finds them 
on the lookout as he takes his place, and finds them 
on the mast as he climbs the ratlines to disentangle a 
rope in the tempest, and finds them swinging on the 
hammock when he turns in. Why not be frank and 
acknowledge it — the most of us would long ago have 
been dashed to pieces had not gracious and loving 
hands steadily, and lovingly, and mightily held the 
rope. 



CHAPTER V. 



THE NEEDLE. 

History has told the story of the crown ; the epic 
poet has sung of the sword ; the pastoral poet, with 
his verses full of the redolence of clover tops and 
a-rustle with the silk of the corn, has sung the praises 
of the plow. I sound the praises of the needle. 
From the fig-leaf robe prepared in the Garden of 
Eden, to the last stitch taken, the needle has wrought 
wonders of generosity, kindness, and benefaction. It 
adorned the girdle of the high-priest; it fashioned 
the curtains in the ancient tabernacle ; it cushioned 
the chariots of King Solomon ; it provided the robes 
of Queen Elizabeth, and in high places and in low 
places, by the fire of the pioneer's back log, and 
under the flash of the chandelier — everywhere it has 
clothed nakedness, it has preached the Gospel, it has 
overcome hosts of penury and want with the war- 
cry of "Stitch ! stitch ! stitch !" 

The operatives have found a livelihood by it, and 
through it the mansions of the employer have been 
constructed. Amid the greatest triumphs in all ages 
and lands I set down the conquests of the needle. I 
admit its crimes. I admit its cruelties. It has had 
more martyrs than the fire. It has butchered more 
souls than the inquisition. It has punctured the eye. 
It has pierced the side. It has struck weakness into 
the lungs. It has sent madness into the brain. It 

7 6 



THE NEEDLE. 



77 



has filled the potter's field. It has pitched whole 
armies of the suffering into crime, and wretchedness, 
and woe. But now that I speak of Dorcas and her 
ministries to the poor, I shall relate only the charities 
of the needle. 

This woman was a representative of all those 
women who make garments for the destitute, who 
knit socks for the barefooted, who prepare bandages 
for the lacerated, who fix up boxes of clothing for 
Western missionaries, who go into the asylums of 
the suffering and destitute, bearing that Gospel which 
is sight for the blind, and hearing for the deaf, and 
which makes the lame man leap like a hart, and 
brings the dead to life, immortal' health bounding in 
their pulses. 

What a contrast between the practical benevolence 
of this woman and a great deal of the charity of this 
day ! This woman did not spend her time idly plan- 
ning how the poor of Joppa were to be relieved ; she 
took her needle and relieved them. She was not 
like those persons who sympathize with imaginary 
sorrows, and go out in the street and laugh at the boy 
who has upset his basket of cold victuals, or like that 
charity which makes a rousing speech on the benevo- 
lent platform and goes out to kick the beggar from 
the step, crying : "Hush your miserable howling!" 
The sufferers of the world want not so much theory 
as practice ; not so much tears as dollars ; not so 
much kind wishes as loaves of bread ; not so much 
smiles as shoes ; not so much "God bless yous !" as 
jackets and frocks. 

I will put one earnest Christian man, hard-working, 
against 5,000 mere theorists on the subject of charity. 
There are a great many who have fine ideas about 



73 



THE NEEDLE. 



church architecture who never in their life helped to 
build a church. There are men who can give you 
the history of Buddhism and Mohammedanism, who 
never sent a farthing for their evangelization. There 
are women who talk beautifully about the suffering 
of the world, who never had the courage, like Dor- 
cas, to take the needle and assault it. 

I am glad that there is not a page of the world's 
history which is not a record of female benevolence. 

God says to all lands and people : "Come now, 
and hear the widow's mite rattle down into the poor- 
box." The Princess of Conti sold all her jewels that 
she might help the famine-stricken. Queen Blanche, 
the wife of Louis VI'II, of France, hearing that there 
were some persons unjustly incarcerated in the 
prisons, went out amid the rabble and took a stick 
and struck the door as a signal that they might all 
strike it, and down went the prison-door, and out 
came the prisoners. Queen Maud, the wife of Henry 
I., went down amid the poor and washed their sores 
and administered to them cordials. Mrs. Retson, at 
Matagorda, appeared on the battlefield while the 
missiles of death were flying around, and cared for 
the wounded. 

But why go so far back ? Why go so far away ? 
Is there a man or woman who has forgotten the 
women of the sanitary and Christian commissions, or 
the fact that before the smoke had gone up from 
Gettysburg and South Mountain, the women of the 
North met the women of the South on the battlefield, 
forgetting all their animosities while they bound up 
the wounded and closed up the eyes of the slain? 
Have you forgotten Dorcas, the benefactress ! 

There are a great many who go out of life and are 



THE NEEDLE. 



79 



unmissed. There may be a very large funeral ; there 
may be a great many carriages and a plumed hearse ; 
there may be high-sounding eulogiums ; the bell may 
toll at the cemetery gate ; there may be a very fine 
marble shaft reared over the resting-place ; but the 
whole thing may be a falsehood and a sham. The 
Church of God has lost nothing. The world has lost 
nothing. It is only a nuisance abated ; it is only a 
grumbler ceasing to find fault; it is only an idler 
stopped yawning; it is only a dissipated fashionable 
parted from his wine cellar ; while, on the other 
hand, no useful Christian leaves this world without 
being missed. The Church of God cries out, like the 
prophet: -'Howl, fir-tree, for the cedar has fallen !" 
Widowhood comes and shows the garments which 
the departed had made. Orphans are lifted up to 
look into the calm face of the sleeping benefactress. 
Reclaimed vagrancy comes and kisses the cold brow 
of her who charmed it away from sin, and all through 
the streets of Joppa there is mourning, mourning 
because Dorcas is dead. 

I suppose you have read of the fact that when 
Josephine was carried out to her grave there were 
a great many men and women of pomp, and pride, 
and position, that went out after her ; but I am most 
affected by the story of history, that on that day 
there were 10,000 of the poor of France who followed 
her coffin, weeping and wailing until the air rang 
again, because, when they lost Josephine they lost 
their last earthly friend. Oh, who would not rather 
have such obsequies than all the tears that were ever 
poured in the lachrymals that have been exhumed 
from ancient cities ? 

There may be no mass for the dead ; there may be 



8o 



THE NEEDLE. 



no costly sarcophagus ; there may be no elaborate 
mausoleum ; but in the damp cellars of the city, and 
through the lonely huts of the mountain glen, there 
will be mourning, mourning, mourning, because Dor- 
cas is dead. "Blessed are the dead who die in the 
Lord ; they rest from their labors, and their works 
do follow them." 



CHAPTER VI. 



THE SECRET OUT. 

" Samuel said, What meaneth then this bleating of the sheep in 
mine ears, and the lowing of the oxen which I hear?" — I. Sam. 15 : 14. 

The Amalekites thought that they had conquered 
God, and that He would never execute His threats 
against them. They had murdered the Israelites in 
battle and out of battle, and left no outrage untried. 
They thought that God either did not dare to punish 
them, or that He had forgotten so to do. Let us see. 
Samuel, the Lord's prophet, tells Saul to go down 
and destroy the Amalekites, leaving not one of them 
alive, and to destroy all the beasts in their possession, 
ox and sheep, camel and ass. 

The Amalekites and Israelites confront each other. 
The trumpets of battle are blown, peal on peal. 
Awful scene, that ancient battle. But huzza ! for the 
Israelites. More than two hundred thousand men 
wave their plumes and clap their shields, for God has 
given them the victory. Huzza ! for Israel. 

Yet this triumphant army is soon captured and 
conquered by sheep and oxen. God told Saul to go 
and destroy the Amalekites, and to destroy all the 
beasts in their possession. Saul thought he knew 
better than the Lord, and so he saves Agag, the king 
of the Amalekites, and saves some of the finest of the 
sheep and the oxen. He thinks he has cheated the 
prophet, and through him cheated the Lord, and he 

81 6 



82 



THE SECRET OUT. 



is driving these sheep and oxen on toward his home. 
He has no idea that Samuel, the prophet, will ever 
find it out. 

Samuel meets him. Saul with solemn visage — for 
there is no one that can look more solemn than your 
genuine hypocrite — Saul says : .."I have fulfilled the 
commandment of the Lord." Samuel listens, and at 
that moment he hears the noisy drove in the rear, and 
he says to Saul : " If you have done as you have 
said, if you have obeyed the Lord, what meaneth the 
bleating of the sheep that I hear, and the lowing of 
the oxen in mine ear?" One would have thought 
that Saul's cheek would have been consumed with 
blushes. No. He says : " I did not do this ; the 
army did it. The army are saving these sheep and 
oxen for sacrifice." Then Samuel slashes Agag to 
pieces, and in Oriental style takes hold of the skirt of 
his coat, and rends it apart, as much as to say, " So 
shall you be rent from your crown, so shall you be 
rent from your kingdom, and all nations shall know 
that Saul, by disobeying God, won a flock of sheep, 
but lost a kingdom." 

God will expose hypocrisy. Saul thought this 
whole thing had been hushed up, and he had no idea 
that the secret of his disobedience would ever come 
out, and at the most inopportune time the sheep 
bleat, and the oxen bellowed. A hypocrite is one 
who professes to be what he is not, or to do that 
which he does not. Saul was a type of a large class. 
A hypocrite in our time is a man who looks awfully 
solemn, whines in his prayer, never laughs or smiles, 
or, if he should be caught laughing or smiling, after- 
ward is apologetic, as though he had committed some 
great sin. The first time he has a chance, he prays 



THE SECRET OUT. 



83 



twenty minutes in a prayer-meeting, and if he give an 
exhortation, it is with an air that seems to imply that 
all men are sinners save one, his modesty forbidding 
that he should state who that one is. In Churches of 
Christ all over the land are ecclesiastical Uriah Heeps. 
When the fox begins to pray look out for your 
chickens ! The genuine impostor in religion makes a 
pride of his misery. The genuine Christian finds 
religion a joy. The hypocrite has pride in his being 
uncomfortable. 

Those are the kind of men that damage the Church 
of Jesus Christ. Wolves are not of so much danger, 
save when they are in sheep's clothing. Arnold was 
of more peril to the American' army than Cornwallis 
and his host. A ship may outride a hundred storms, 
and yet a handful of worms in a plank may sink it to 
the bottom. The Church of Jesus Christ has not so 
much fear of cyclones of persecution as it has of the 
vermin of hypocrisy sometimes infesting it. 

Now, such hypocrisy will be exposed. God sees 
behind the curtain as well as before the curtain. God 
sees everything inside out. All their solemn looks 
will not save them. All their long prayers will 
not save them. All their professions of religion 
wall not save them. Their real character will be 
demonstrated, and at the most unexpected moment 
the sheep will bleat and the oxen will bellow. 

One of the cruel bishops of olden time, about to 
put one of the martyrs to death, began by saying ; 
" In the name of God, amen." The martyr said : 
" Don't say ' in the name of God ! ' " And yet how 
many cruel and mean things are done in the name of 
religion and sanctity. You sometimes see ecclesi- 
astical courts, when they are about to devour some 



8 4 



THE SECRET OUT. 



good brother, begin by being tremendously pious 
in their utterances, the venom of their assault corre- 
sponding with the heavenly pathos of the prelude. 
About to devour him, they say grace before the 
meal ! Just at the time when you expect them almost 
to rise in translation, and are beginning to think that 
nothing but the weight of their boots and overcoats 
keep them down, the sheep bleat and the oxen bellow. 
Ah ! my friends, pretend to be no more than that you 
are. If you have the grace of God, profess it ; but 
profess to have no more than you really possess. If 
you have none of it, do not profess to have it. 

History tells of Ottocar who was asked to kneel 
before Randolphus I. Coming into the presence of 
the king, Ottocar declined to kneel, but after a while 
he -compromised the matter and said : " I will kneel 
in private some time in your tent where no one sees 
me." But the servant of the king arranged a rope 
by which he could instantly let the tent drop. After 
a while Ottocar came into the tent and knelt before 
Randolphus in worship. The king's servant drew 
the cord and the tent dropped, and Ottocar in the 
presence of two great armies, was kneeling before 
Randolphus. Ah! my friends, if you pretend that 
you are a servant of Jesus Christ, and at the same 
time are kneeling to the world, the tent has already 
dropped, and all the armies of heaven are gazing on 
the hypocrisy. The universe is a very public place, 
and hypocrisy always comes to exposure. 

But while there is one hypocrite in the Church 
there are five hundred outside of it, for the field is 
larger. People sometimes look over into the Church, 
and they find here and there a hypocrite, and they 
denounce the Church of God. You have more on 



THE SECRET OUT. 



85 



your side than we have on our side. Five hundred 
to one. Men who in your presence are obsequious, 
while at the same time they are angling for an imper- 
fection. They are digging for a bait. Men who will 
be in your presence in commercial circles as genial 
as a summer morn, while they have the fierceness of 
a catamount and the slyness of a snake and the spite 
of a devil. But the gun they shoot off will burst in 
their own hands; the lies they tell crack their own 
teeth, and their hypocrisy will be demonstrated, and 
at the most unexpected time the sheep will bleat and 
the oxen will bellow. 

It is very natural to put off sin on other people. 
Saul, confronted with his crime, said : " Oh, it wasn't 
me, it was the army ; they saved these sheep and 
oxen, and disobeved the command of God. It wasn't 
me. Oh, no, it was the army." Human nature the 
same in all ages. Adam confronted with his sin, said : 
" The woman tempted me and I did eat." And she 
charged it upon the serpent, and if the serpent could 
have spoken it would have charged it upon the devil; 
when the simple circumstance, I suppose, was that 
Adam saw Eve eating this forbidden fruit, and he 
begged and coaxed until he got a piece of it ! Adam 
just as much to blame as Eve. Ah ! my brother, you 
cannot put off your sins on other people. Saul 
thought he could, but he could not. 

God demanded the obliteration of all of the Amal- 
ekites, and the destruction of all the beasts they 
owned, and Saul saves Agag, the King of the Amal- 
ekites, and those fine sheep and oxen. God said, 
extermination. Why, do you suppose that if we 
have as many sins as there were men in the army of 
the Amalekites, God is going to let us keep any of 
them? They have all to be exterminated. 



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THE SECRET OUT. 



Here is a Christian man who says : " I have an 
Amalekitish sin which I call jealousy." Down with 
jealousy. Here is a Christian man who says : " I 
have an Amalekitish sin which I will call backbiting." 
Down with backbiting. A Christian says: " I have 
an Amalekitish sin which is an appetite for strong 
drink." Down with that appetite. Meanwhile, out 
yonder, there is a sin lifting up its head. What is 
that? It is Agag. That is worldliness. That is a 
pet sin, it is a darling sin he is going to let live. No 
mercy for Agag. You cannot keep a darling sin. 
Extermination ! 

Some Presbyterians call it "the higher life;" some 
Methodists call it " perfection ;" I do not care what 
you call it ; but without holiness no man shall see the 
Lord. We have to give up all our sins, my brothers 
and sisters ; give them all up. No mercy for Agag. 
Saul kept, I suppose, the finest, the fattest of the 
sheep, and killed the meanest. And there are many 
Christians who kill their unpopular <sins and keep 
the respectable sins, while the Lord God from the 
heavens thunders extermination. 

A mere profession of religion, if it be not backed 
up by right behavior, amounts to nothing, and worse 
than nothing. Saul came out with a magnificent pro- 
fession of religion. He says : " I have fulfilled the 
commandments of the Lord. Just look at me ! See 
what a hero I have been !" Then the sheep bleat and 
the oxen bellowed. It seems to me that the Church 
of Christ is to make a new departure in the direction 
of straightout honesty. I believe the time will come 
when men, instead of going to commercial records to 
see whether a man is A i — hearing that a man who 
proposes a bargain is a member of the Christian 



THE SECRET OUT. 



87 



Church, a professor of religion — the merchant will 
say : " That is all I need." 

But how much a church certificate would be worth 
in Wall Street to-day, judge ye ! It seems to me the 
Church has not kept up with the world's enterprise. 
It used to take a good while to make a sixpenny nail. 
A bar would be thrust into the hot coals, and then 
the bellows would blow, and then the bar would be 
brought out on the anvil, and they would pound it 
and smite it and cut it and cleave it, and there would 
be the nail. Now, a bar is thrust, into a machine, and 
instantly there is a whole shower of nails on the 
floor of the manufactory. It used to take a great 
while to thresh wheat. The farmer would slowly un- 
fasten the band from the sheaf, then he would shake 
out the sheaf on the floor, and then he would take 
the slow flail, and pound out the wheat from the 
straw. Now, the horses start, or the engine begins 
to hiss, and there are many sheaves instantly 
threshed. The printing-press that made two hun- 
dred and fifty impressions an hour was considered 
wonderful. Now, tens of thousands of impressions 
are made in the same length of time. The mail was 
a very slow institution. Once in two weeks it went 
from London to Edinburgh. Once in two weeks 
it went from New York to Boston. Now, a half 
dozen times a day you have to run to get out of the 
way, or you will be run over by the wagons that 
come through Nassau Street, with whole tons of 
United States mail. Over eight hundred millions of 
letters and papers in one year going through that 
mail. Changes in jurisprudence. Constitution of the 
State of New York changed in 1846. Improvements 
in the criminal code. Improvements in the civil 
code. Law of 1773 not fit for 1883. 



88 



THE SECRET OUT. 



Now, has the Church of God kept up with the 
movements of the day ? with art, with science, with 
modern travel. "Oh," says some one, "there are no 
new principles to be evolved in religion." Ah ! I ad- 
mit it. There are no new principles in nature. They 
are new to us, but they are old principles brought 
out into demonstration and into light. The law of 
gravitation did not wait until Isaac Newton was 
born. There was just as much electricity in the sum- 
mer clouds before Benjamin Franklin began to play 
kite with the thunderstorm, as afterward ; just as 
much power in steam before Robert Fulton was' born 
as afterward. The carboniferous and jurassic strata 
of the earth did not wait to be laid down until Hugh 
Miller plunged his geological crowbar. They are old 
principles, as old as the world, but brought to new 
demonstration. So I say in regard to religion. If a 
man tells me he has a new religion, I say, " I have no 
faith in it, for the Bible is my standard." But if he 
comes and says to me, " I have a new application of 
the old principle," I say, " Hear, hear, hear !" 

Now what I want is to have this old Gospel wheel, 
this grand Gospel wheel which has turned so mag- 
nificently so many years, to have another band put 
on it, the band connecting it with every shop, with 
every store, with every banking house, with every 
institution, with every place of hard work — the 
religion of Jesus Christ making its conquest in the 
direction of common honesty, so that when a man 
shall say, as Saul said, " I have fulfilled the command- 
ment of the Lord," everybody will believe him. 



CHAPTER VII. 



THE EYE. 

The imperial organ of the human system is the eye. 
The surgeons, the doctors, the anatomists, and the 
physiologists understand much of the glories of the 
two great lights of the human face ; but the vast mul- 
titudes go on from cradle to grave without any 
appreciation ol the two great masterpieces of the Lord 
God Almighty. If God had lacked anything of infi- 
nite wisdom He would have failed in creating the 
human eye. We wander through the earth trying to 
see wonderful sights, but the most wonderful sight 
that we ever see is not so wonderful as the instru- 
ments through which we see it. 

It has been a strange thing to me for thirty years 
that some scientist with enough eloquence and mag- 
netism, did not go through the country with illus- 
trated lecture on canvas thirty feet square, to startle 
and thrill and ^overwhelm Christendom with the 
marvels of the human eye. We want the eye taken 
from all its technicalities, and some one who shall lay 
aside all talk about the pterygomaxillary, fissures, the 
sclerotica, and the chiasma of the optic nerve, and in 
plain, common parlance which you and I and every- 
body can understand, present the subject. We have 
learned men who have been telling us what our 
origin is and what we were. Oh, if some one should 
come forth from the dissecting-table and from the 

89 



9 o 



THE EYE. 



class room of the university and take the platform, 
and asking the help of the Creator, demonstrate the 
wonders of what we are. 

The. eyes of fish and reptiles and moles and bats are 
very simple things because they have not much to 
do. There are insects with a hundred eyes, but the 
hundred eyes have less faculty than the two human 
eyes. The black beetle swimming the summer pond 
has two eyes under the water and two eyes above 
the water, but the four insectile are not equal to the 
two human. Man placed at the head of all living 
creatures must have supreme equipment, while the 
blind fish in the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky have 
only an undeveloped organ of sight, an apology for 
the eye, which, if through some crevice of the moun- 
tain they should go into the sunlight, might be 
developed into positive eyesight. 

In the first chapter of Genesis we find that God 
without any consultation created the light, created 
the trees, created the fish, created the fowl, but when 
He was about to create man He called a convention 
of divinity, as though to imply that all the powers of 
Godhead were to be enlisted in the achievement. 
" Let us make man." Put a whole ton of emphasis on 
that word " us." " Let us make man." And if God 
called a convention of divinity to create man, I think 
the two great questions in that conference were how 
to create a soul, and how to make an appropriate 
window for the emperor to look out of. 

See how God honored the eye before he created it. 
He cried until chaos was irradiated with the utter- 
ance : " Let there be light " ! In other words, before 
he introduced man into this temple of the worlpl He 
illumined it, prepared it for the eyesight. And so 



THE EYE. 



91 



after the last human eye has been destroyed in the 
final demolition of the world, stars are to fall and the 
sun is to cease its shining, and the moon is to turn 
into blood. In other words, after the human eyes 
are no more to be profited by their shining, the 
chandeliers of heaven are to be turned out. God to 
educate and to bless and to help the human eye, set 
on the mantel of heaven two lamps — a gold lamp and 
a silver lamp — the one for the day, and the other for 
the night. 

To show how God honors the eye, look at the two 
halls built for the residence of the eyes. Seven bones 
making the wall for each eye, the seven bones 
curiously wrought together. Kingly palace of ivory 
is considered rich, but the halls for the residence of 
the human eyes are richer by so much as human 
bone is more sacred than elephantine tusk. See how 
God honored the eyes when He made a roof for them, 
so that the sweat of toil should not smart them, and 
the rain dashing against the forehead might not drip 
into them ; the eyebrows not bending over the eye, 
but reaching to the right and to the left so that the 
rain and the sweat should be compelled to drop upon 
the cheek instead of falling into this divinely pro- 
tected human eyesight. 

See how God honored the eye in the fact presented 
by anatomists and physiologists that there are 800 
contrivances in every eye. For window shutters, the 
eyelids opening and closing 30,000 times a day. The 
eyelashes so constructed that they have their selec- 
tion as to what shall be admitted, saying to the dust, 
" Stay out," and saying to the light, " Come in." For 
inside curtain the iris, or pupil of the eye, according 
as the light is greater or less, contracting or dilating. 



9 2 



THE EYE. 



The eye of the owl is blind in the daytime, the 
eyes of some creatures are blind at night, but the 
human eye so marvelously constructed it can see 
both by day and by night. 

Many of the other creatures of God can move the 
eye only from side to side, but the human eye so mar- 
velously constructed, has one muscle to lift the eye and 
another muscle to lower the eye, and another muscle 
to roll it to the right, and another muscle to roll it to 
the left, and another muscle passing through a pulley 
to turn it round and round — an elaborate gearing of 
six muscles as perfect as God could make them. 

There also is the retina gathering the rays of light 
and passing the visual impression along the optic 
nerve about the thickness of the lamp wick, passing 
the visual impression on to the sensorium and on into 
the soul. What a delicate lens, what an exquisite 
screen, what soft cushions, what wonderful chemistry 
of,the human eye. The eye washed by a slow stream 
of moisture, whether we sleep or wake, rolling imper- 
ceptibly over the pebble of the eye and emptying 
into a bone of the nostril — a contrivance so wonder- 
ful that it can see the sun, ninety-five millions of miles 
away, and the point of a pin. Telescope and micro- 
scope in the same contrivance. The astronomer 
swings and moves this way and that, and adjusts and 
readjusts the telescope until he gets it to the right 
focus ; the microscopist moves this way and that, and 
adjusts and readjusts the magnifying glass until it is 
prepared to do its work, but the human eye without 
a touch beholds the star and the smallest insect. The 
traveler among the Alps with one glance taking in 
Mont Blanc and the face of his watch, to see whether 
he has time to climb it. Oh, this wonderful camera 



THE EYE. 



93 



obscura which you and I carry about with us, so to-day 
we camtake in this audience, so from the top of Mount 
Washington we can take in New England, so at night 
we can sweep into our vision the constellations from 
horizon to horizon. So delicate, so semi-infinite, and 
yet the light coming ninety-five millions of miles at 
the rate of two hundred thousand miles a second, is 
obliged to halt at the gate of the eye, waiting until 
the portcullis be lifted. Something hurled ninety- 
five millions of miles and striking an instrument 
which has not the agitation of even winking under 
the power of the stroke. 

There, also, is the merciful arrangement of the tear 
gland, by which the eye is washed, and through 
which rolls the tide which brings the relief that 
comes in tears when some bereavement or great loss 
strikes us. The tear not an augmentation of sorrow, 
but the breaking up of the Arctic of frozen grief in 
the warm Gulf Stream of consolation. Incapacity to 
weep is madness or death. Thank God for the tear 
glands, and that the crystal gates are so easily 
opened. 

Oh, the wonderful hydraulic apparatus of the 
human eye. Divinely constructed vision. Two light- 
houses at the harbor of the immortal soul, under the 
shining of which the world sails in and drops anchor. 
What an anthem of praise to God is the human eye. 
The tongue is speechless and a clumsy instrument of 
expression as compared with it. Have you not seen 
it flash with indignation, or kindle with enthusiasm, 
or expand with devotion, or melt with sympathy, or 
stare with fright, or leer with villainy, or droop with 
sadness, or pale with envy, or fire with revenge, or 
twinkle with mirth, or beam with love ? It is tragedy 



94 



THE EYE. 



and comedy and pastoral and lyric in turn. Have 
you not seen its uplifted brow of surprise,' or its 
frown of wrath, or its contraction of pain ? If the 
eye say one thing and the lips say another thing, you 
believe the eye rather than the lips. The eyes of 
Archibald Alexander, and Charles S. Finney, were 
the mightiest part of their sermon. George White- 
field enthralled great assemblages with his eyes, 
though they were crippled with strabismus. Many 
a military chieftain has, with a look, hurled a regi- 
ment to victory or to death. Martin Luther turned 
his great eye on an assassin who came to take his life, 
and the villain fled. Under the glance of the human 
eye the tiger, with five times a man's strength, snarls 
back into the African jungle. 

The Earl of Bridgewater, in his last will and testa- 
ment bequeathed $40,000 for essays to be written on 
the power, and wisdom, and goodness of God, as 
manifested in creation, and Sir Charles Bell, the 
British surgeon, fresh from Corunna and Waterloo, 
where he had been tending the wounded and study- 
ing the formation of the human body amid the ampu- 
tating horrors of the battlefield, accepted the 
invitation to write, one of those Bridgewater treatises, 
and he wrote his book on the human hand — a book 
that will live as long as the world lives. I have only 
hinted at the splendors, the glories, the wonders, the 
divine revelations, the apocalypses of the human eye, 
and I stagger back from the awful porfals of the 
physiological miracle which must have taxed the 
ingenuity of a God, to cry out: "He that formed 
the eye, shall He not see ?" Shall Herschel not know 
as much as his telescope? Shall Fraunhofer not 
know as much as his spectroscope ? Shall Swam- 



THE EYE. 



95 



merdam not know as much as his microscope ? Shall 
Dr. Hooke not know as much as his micrometer? 
Shall the thing formed know more than its maker? 
"He that formed the eye, shall He not see?" 

The recoil of this question is tremendous. We 
stand at the center of a vast circumference of obser- 
vation. No privacy. On us, eyes of cherubim, eyes 
of seraphim, eyes of archangel, eyes of God. We 
may not be able to see the inhabitants of* other 
worlds, but perhaps they may be able to see us. We 
have not optical instruments strong enough to descry 
them ; perhaps they have optical instruments strong 
enough to descry us. The mole can not see the eagle 
mid-air, but the eagle mid-sky can see the mole mid- 
grass. We are able to see mountains and caverns of 
another world ; but perhaps the inhabitants of other 
worlds can see the towers of our cities, the flash of 
our seas, the marching of our processions, the white 
robes of our weddings, the black scarfs of our 
obsequies. It passes out from the guess into the posi- 
tive, when we are told in the Bible that the inhab- 
itants of other worlds do come or convey to this. 
Are they not all ministering spirits sent forth to min- 
ister to those who shall be heirs of salvation? Oh, 
the eye of God, so full of pity, so full of power, so 
full of love, so full of indignation, so full of compas- 
sion, so full of mercy. How it peers through the 
darkness. How it outshines the day. How it glares 
upon the offender. How it beams on the penitent 
soul. Talk about the human eye as being indescrib- 
ably wonderful — how much more wonderful the 
great, searching, overwhelming eye of God. All 
eternity past and all eternity to come on that retina. 
The eyes with which we look into each other's face 



9 6 



THE EYE. 



to-day suggest it. It stands written twice on your 
face and twice on mine, unless through casualty one 
or both have been obliterated. "He that formed the 
eye, shall He not see ?" Oh, the eye of God. It 
sees our sorrows to assuage them, sees our perplex- 
ities to disentangle them, sees our wants to sympa- 
thize with them. If we fight Him back, the eye of 
an antagonist. If we ask His grace, the eye of an 
everlasting friend. 



CHAPTER VIII. 



THE EAR. 

Architecture is one of the most fascinating arts, 
and the study of Egyptian, Grecian, Etruscan, Ro- 
man, Byzantine, Moorish, Renaissance styles of 
building, has been to many a man a sublime life- 
work. Lincoln and York Cathedrals, St. Paul's and 
St. Peter's, and Arch of Titus, and Theban Temple, 
and Alhambra, and Parthenon, are the monuments to 
the genius of those who built them. But more won- 
derful than any arch they ever lifted, or any transept 
window they ever illumined, or any Corinthian col- 
umn they ever crowned, or any Gothic cloister they 
ever elaborated, is the human ear. 

Among the most skillful and assiduous physi- 
ologists of our time have been those who have given 
their time to the examination of the ear, and the 
studying of its arches, its walls, its floor, its canals, its 
aqueducts, its galleries, its intricacies, its convulsions, 
its divine machinery, and yet, it will take another 
thousand years before the world comes to any ade- 
quate appreciation of what God did when He planned 
and executed the infinite and overmastering archi- 
tecture of the human ear. The most of it is invisible, 
and the microscope breaks down in the attempt at 
exploration. The cartilage which we call the ear is 
only the storm door of the great temple clear down 
out of sight, next door to the immortal soul. 

97 7 



9 8 



THE EAR. 



Such scientists as Helmholtz, and Conte, and De 
Blainville, and Rank, and Buck, have attempted to 
walk the Appian Way ol the human ear, but the mys- 
terious pathway has never been fully trodden but by 
two feet — the foot of sound and the foot of God. 
Three ears on each side the head — the external ear, 
the middle ear, the internal ear, but all connected by 
most wonderful telegraphy. 

The external ear in all ages adorned by precious 
stones or precious metals. The Temple of Jerusalem, 
partly built by the contribution of earrings, and 
Homer, in the Iliad, speaks of Hera, the three bright 
drops, her glittering gems suspended from the ear ; 
and many of the adornments of our day are only 
copies of ear-jewels found to-day in Pompeiian mu- 
seum and Etruscan vase. But while the outer ear 
may be adorned by human art, the middle and the 
internal ear are adorned and garnished only by the 
hand of the Lord God Almighty. The stroke of a 
key of this organ sets the air vibrating, and the ear 
catches the undulating sound, and passes it on 
through the bonelets of the middle ear to the in- 
ternal ear, which is filled with liquid, and that liquid 
again vibrates until the three thousand fibers of the 
human brain take up the vibration, and roll the sound 
on into the soul. 

The hidden machinery of the ear, by physiologists 
called by the names of things familiar to us, like the 
hammer, something to strike — like the anvil, some- 
thing to be smitten — like the stirrup of the saddle 
with which we mount the steed — like the drum, 
beaten in the march — like the harp strings, to be 
swept by music. Coiled like a snail shell, by which 
one of the innermost passages of the ear is actually 



THE EAR. 



99 



called — like a stairway, the sound to ascend — like a 
bent tube of a heating apparatus, taking that which 
enters round and round — like a labyrinth with won- 
derful passages into which the thought enters only to 
be lost in bewilderment. The middle ear filled with 
air, the medium of the sound as it passes to the in- 
ternal ear filled with liquid — a muscle contracting 
when the noise is too loud, just as the pupil of the 
eye contracts when the light is too glaring. The ex- 
ternal ear is defended by wax, which with its bitter- 
ness, discourages insectile invasion. The internal 
ear embedded in what is by far the hardest bone of 
the human system, a very rock of strength and 
defiance. 

The ear, so strange a contrivance, that by the esti- 
mates of one scientist, it can catch the sound of 
seventy-three thousand seven hundred vibrations in 
a second. The outer ear taking in all kinds of sound, 
whether the crash of an avalanche, or the hum of a 
bee. The sound passing to the iuner door of the 
outside ear, halts until another mechanism, divine 
mechanism, passes it on by the bonelets of the middle 
ear, and coming to the inner door of the second ear, 
the sound has no power to come further until another 
divine mechanism passes it on through into the inner 
ear, and then the sound swims the liquid until it 
comes to the rail-track of the brain branchlet, and 
rolls on and on until it comes to sensation, and there 
the curtain drops, and a hundred gates shut, and the 
voice of God seems to say to all human inspection : 
" Thus far and no farther." 

In this vestibule of the palace of the soul, how 
many kings of thought, of medicine, of physiology, 
have done penance of lifelong study, and got no 



I GO 



THE EAR. 



further than the vestibule. Mysterious home of re- 
verberation and echo. Grand Central Depot of 
sound. Headquarters to which there come quick 
dispatches, part the way by cartilage, part the way 
by air, part the way by bone, part the way by water, 
part the way by nerve — the slowest dispatch plung- 
ing into the ear at the speed of one thousand and 
ninety feet a second. 

Small instrument of music on which is played all 
the music you ever hear, from the grandeurs of an 
August thunderstorm to the softest breathings of a 
flute. Small instrument of music, only a quarter of 
an inch of surface and the thinness of one two hun- 
dred and fiftieth part of an inch, and that thinness 
divided into three layers. In that ear musical staff, 
lines, spaces, bar and rest. A bridge leading from 
the outside natural world to the inside spiritual 
world ; we seeing the abutment at this end of the 
bridge, but the fog of an uplifted mystery hiding the 
abutment at the other end of the bridge. Whisper- 
ing gallery of the soul. The human voice is God's 
eulogy to the ear. That voice capable of producing 
seventeen trillion, five hundred and ninety-two bil- 
lion, one hundred and eighty-six million, forty-four 
thousand, four hundred and fifteen sounds, and all 
that variety made, not for the regalement of beast or 
bird, but for the human ear. 

Struggling on up from six years of age when he 
was left fatherless, Wagner rose from the obloquy of 
the world, and oft-times all nations seemingly against 
him, until he gained the favor of a king, and won the 
enthusiasm of the opera houses of Europe and 
America. Struggling all the way on to seventy 
years of age, to conquer the world's ear. 



THE EAR. 103 

In that same attempt to master the human ear and 
gain supremacy over this gate of the immortal soul, 
great battles were fought by Mozart, Gluck and 
Weber, and by Beethoven and Meyerbeer, by Ros- 
sini, and by all the roll of German and Italian and 
French composers, some of them in the battle leaving 
their blood on the keynotes and the musical scores. 
Great battle fought for the ear — fought with baton, 
with organ pipe, with trumpet, with cornet-a-piston, 
with all ivory and brazen and silver and golden 
weapons of the orchestra ; royal theatre and cathe- 
dral and academy of music the fortresses of the con- 
test for the ea.r. England and Egypt fought for the 
supremacy of the Suez Canal, and the Spartans and 
the Persians fought for the defile at Thermopylae, but 
the musicians of all ages have fought for the mastery 
of the auditory canal and the defile of the immortal 
soul and the Thermopylae of struggling cadences. 

For the conquest of the ear, Haydn struggled on 
up from the garret where he had neither fire nor 
food, on and on until under the too great nervous 
strain of hearing his own oratorio of the " Creation " 
porformed, he was carried out to die, but leaving as 
his legacy to the world 118 symphonies, 163 pieces 
for the baritone, 15 masses, 5 oratorios, 42 German 
and Italian songs, 39 canons, 365 English and Scotch 
songs with accompaniment, and 1536 pages of libretti. 
All that to capture the gate of the body that swings 
in from the tympanum to the snail shell lying on the 
beach of the ocean of the immortal soul. 

To conquer the ear, Handel .struggled on from the 
time when his father would not let him go to school 
lest he learn the gamut and become a musician, and 
from the time when he was allowed in the organ loft 



just to plav after the audience had left, one volun- 
tary, to the time when he left to all nations his 
unparalleled oratorios of " Esther," " Deborah/' 
-Samson," "Jephthah," "Judas Maccabeus," "Israel 
in Egypt," and the " Messiah," the soul of the great 
German composer still weeping in the dead march of 
our great obsequies, and triumphing in the raptures 
of every Easter morn. 

To conquer the ear and take this gate of the im- 
mortal soul, Schubert composed his immortal " Sere- 
nade," writing the staves of the music on the bill of 
fare in a restaurant, and went on until he could leave 
as a legacy to the world over a thousand magnificent 
compositions in music. To conquer the ear and take 
this gate of the soul's castle, Mozart struggled on 
through poverty until he came to a pauper's grave, 
and one chilly, wet afternoon the body of him who 
gave to the world the " Requiem " and the " G-minor 
Symphonv " w T as crunched in on the top of two other 
paupers into a grave which to this day is epitaphless. 

For the ear everything mellifluous, from the birth 
hour when our earth was" wrapped in swaddling 
clothes of light and serenaded by other worlds, from 
the time when Jubal thrummed the first harp and 
pressed a key of the first organ, down to the music of 
this Sabbath morn. Yea, for the ear the coming 
overtures of heaven, for whatever other part of the 
body may be left in the dust, the ear, we know, is to 
come to celestial life ; otherwise, why the " harpers 
harping with their harps"? For the ear, carol of 
lark and whistle of quail, and chirp of cricket, and 
dash of cascade, and roar of tides oceanic, and 
doxology of worshipful assembly and minstrelsy, 
cherubic, seraphic, and archangelic. For the ear all 



THE EAR. 



105 



Pandean pipes, all flutes, all clarionets, all hautboys, 
all bassoons, all bells, and all organs — Luzerne and 
Westminster Abbey, and Freyburg, and Berlin, and 
all the organ pipes set across Christendom, and great 
Giant's Causeway for the monarchs of music to pass 
over. For the ear, all chimes, all ticking of chro- 
nometers, all anthems, all dirges, all glees, all choruses, 
all lullabies, all orchestration. 

Oh, the ear, the God-honored ear, grooved with 
divine sculpture, and poised with divine gracefulness, 
and upholstered with curtains of divine embroidery, 
and corridored by divine carpentry, and pillared with 
divine architecture, and chiseled in bone of divine 
masonry, and conquered by processions of divine 
marshaling. The ear ! A perpetual point of inter- 
rogation, asking how, a perpetual point of apostrophe 
appealing to God. None but God could plan it. 
None but God could build it. None but God could 
work it. None but God could keep it. None but God 
could understand it. None but God could explain it. 
Oh, the wonders of the human ear. How surpass- 
ingly sacred the human ear. You had better be 
careful how you let the sound of blasphemy or un- 
cleanness step into that holy of holies. The Bible 
says that in the ancient temple the priest was set 
apart by the putting of the blood of a ram on the tip 
of the ear, the right ear of the priest. But, my 
friends, we need all of us to have the sacred touch of 
ordination on the hanging lobe of both ears, and on 
the arches of the ears, on the Eustachian tube of the 
ear, on the mastoid cells of the ear, on the tympanic 
cavity of the ear, and on everything from the outside 
rim of the outside ear clear in to the point where 
sound steps off the auditory nerve and rolls on down 



106 THE EAR. 

into the unfathomable depths of the immortal soul. 
The Bible speaks of "dull ears," and of "uncircum- 
cised ears," and of " itching ears," and of " rebellious 
ears," and of "open ears," and of those who have all 
the organs of hearing and yet who seem to be deaf, 
for it cries to them : " He that hath ears to hear, let 
him hear." 

Oh, yes, my friends, we have been looking for God 
too far away instead of looking for Him close by and 
in our own organism. We go up into the conserva- 
tory and look through the telescope and see God in 
Jupiter, and God in Saturn, and God in Mars; but 
we could see more of Him through the microscope 
of an aurist. No king is satisfied with only one resi- 
dence, and in France it has been St. Cloud and Ver- 
sailles and the Tuilleries, and in Great Britain it has 
been Windsor and Balmoral, and Osborne. A ruler 
does not always prefer the larger. The King of 
earth and heaven may have larger castles and greater 
palaces, but I do not think there is any one more 
curiously wrought than the human ear. The heaven 
of heavens cannot contain Him, and yet He says He 
finds room to dwell in a contrite heart, and I think, 
in a Christian ear. 

We have been looking for God in the infinite— let 
us look for Him in the infinitesimal. God walking 
the corridor of the ear, God sitting in the gallery of 
the human ear, God speaking along the auditory 
nerve of the ear, God dwelling in the ear to hear that 
which comes from the outside, and so near the brain 
and the soul He can hear all that transpires there. 
The Lord of hosts encamping under the curtains of 
membrane. Palace of the Almighty in the human 
ear. The rider on the white horse of the Apocalypse 



THE EAR. 



I07 



thrusting his hand into the loop of bone which the 
physiologist has been pleased to call the stirrup of , 
the ear. 

When a soul prays, God does not sit bolt upright 
until the prayer travels immensity and climbs to His 
ear. The Bible says He bends clear over. In more 
than one place Isaiah said He bowed down His ear. 
In more than one place the Psalmist said He inclined 
His ear, by which I come to believe that God puts 
His ear so closely down to your lips that He can 
hear your faintest whisper. It is not God away off 
lip yonder; it is God away down here, close up, so 
close that when you pray to Him, it is not more a 
whisper than a kiss. Ah ! yes, He hears the captive's 
sigh and the plash of the orphan's tear, and the dying 
syllables of the shipwrecked sailor driven on the 
Skerries, and the infant's " Now I lay me down to 
sleep," as distinctly as He hears the fortissimo of 
brazen bands in the Dusseldorf festival, as easily as 
He hears the salvo of artillery when the thirteen 
squares of English troops open all their batteries at 
once at Waterloo. 

The phonograph is a newly-invented instrument 
which holds not only the words you utter, but the 
very tones of your voice, so that a hundred years 
from now, that instrument turned, the very words 
you now utter and the very tone of your voice will 
be reproduced. Wonderful phonograph. As of our 
beloved dead we keep a lock of hair, or picture of 
the features, so the time will come when we will be 
able to keep the tones of their voices and the words 
they uttered. So that if now dear friends should 
speak into the phonograph some words of affection, 
and then they should be taken away from us, years 



io8 



THE EAR. 



from now, from that instrument we could unroll the 
words they uttered, and the very tones of their voice. 
But more wonderful is God's power to hold, to re- 
tain. Ah! what delightful encouragement for our 
prayers. What an awful fright for our hard speeches. 
What assurance of warm-hearted sympathy for all 
our griefs. 



CHAPTER IX. 



YOUR PEDIGREE. 

This question of heredity is a mighty question. 
The longer I live the more I believe in blood— good 
blood, bad blood, proud blood, humble blood, honest 
blood, thieving blood, heroic blood, cowardly blood. 
The tendency may skip a generation or two, but it is 
sure to come out, as in a little child you sometimes 
see a similarity to a great-grandfather whose picture 
hangs on the wall. That the physical, and mental, 
and moral qualities are inheritable is patent to any 
one who keeps his eyes open. The similarity is so 
striking sometimes as to be amusing. Great families, 
regal or literary, are apt to have the characteristics 
all down through the generations, and what is more 
perceptible in such families, may be seen on a smaller 
scale in all families. A thousand years have no 
power to obliterate the difference. 

The large lip of the House of Austria is seen in all 
the generations, and is called the Hapsburg lip. The 
House of Stuart always means, in all generations, 
cruelty, and bigotry, and sensuality. Witness Mary, 
Queen of Scots. Witness Charles I. and Charles II. 
Witness James I. and James II., and all the other 
scoundrels of that imperial line. Scottish blood 
means persistence, English blood means reverence 
for the ancient, Welsh blood means religiosity, Dan- 
ish blood means fondness for the sea, Indian blood 

109 



I 10 YOUR PEDIGREE. 

means roaming disposition, Celtic blood means fer- 
vid ity, Roman blood means conquest. 

The Jewish facility for accumulation you may 
trace clear back to Abraham, of whom the Bible 
says, " He was rich in silver, and gold, and cattle," 
and to Isaac and Jacob, who had the same charac- 
teristics. Some families are characterized by long- 
evity, and they have a tenacity of life positively 
Methuselish. Others are characterized by Goliathan 
stature, and you can see it for one generation, two 
generations, five generations, in all the generations. 
Vigorous theology runs on in the line of the Alexan- 
ders. Tragedy runs on in the family of the Kembles. 
Literature runs on in the line of the Trollopes. Phi- 
lanthropy runs on in the line of the Wilberforces. 
Statesmanship runs on in the line of the Adamses. 
Henry and Catherine, of Navarre, religious, all their 
family religious. The celebrated family of the Casini, 
all mathematicians. The celebrated family of the 
Medici — grandfather, son, and Catherine — all remark- 
able for keen intellect. The celebrated family of 
Gustavus Adolphus all warriors. 

This law of heredity asserts itself without refer- 
ence to social or political condition, for you some- 
times find the ignoble in high place, and the honorable 
in obscure place. A descendant of Edward I. a toll- 
gatherer. A descendant of Edward III. a door- 
keeper. A descendant of the Duke of Northumber- 
land a trunk-maker. Some of the mightiest families 
of England are extinct, while some of those most 
honored in the peerage go back to an ancestry of hard 
knuckles and rough exterior. This law of heredity en-* 
tirely independent of social or political condition. 
Then you find avarice, and jealousy, and sensuality, 



YOUR PEDIGREE. 



1 1 1 



and fraud having- full swing- in some families. The 
violent temper of Frederick William is the inheritance 
of Frederick the Great. It is not a theory to be set 
forth by worldly philosophy only, but by divine 
authority. Do you not remember how the Bible 
speaks of " a chosen generation," of " the generation 
of the righteous," of " the generation of vipers," of 
an " untoward generation," of " a stubborn genera- 
tion," of " the iniquity of the past visited upon the 
children unto the third and fourth generation " ? 

" Well, says some one, " that theory discharges me 
from all responsibility. Born of sanctified parents, 
we are bound to be good, and we cannot help our- 
selves. Born of unrighteous parentage, we are 
bound to be evil, and we cannot help ourselves." 

As much as if you should say, "The centripetal 
force in nature has a tendency to bring everything 
to the center, and therefore all things come to the 
center. The centrifugal force in nature has a tend- 
ency to throw out everything to the periphery, and 
therefore everything will go out to the periphery." 
You know as well as I know that you can make the 
centripetal overcome the centrifugal, and you can 
make the centrifugal overcome the centripetal. As 
when there is a mighty tide of good in a family that 
may be overcome by determination to evil, as in the 
case of Aaron Burr, the libertine, who had for father, 
President Burr, the consecrated ; as in the case of 
Pierrepont Edwards, the scourge of New York soci- 
ety seventy years ago, who had a Christian ancestry ; 
while on the other hand some of the best men and 
women of this day are those who have come of an 
ancestry of which it would not be courteous to speak 
in their presence. 



112 



YOUR PEDIGREE. 



If you have come of a Christian ancestry, then you 
are solemnly bound to preserve and develop the 
glorious inheritance ; or if you have come of a de- 
praved ancestry, then it is your duty to brace your- 
self against the evil tendency by all prayer and Chris- 
tian determination, and you are to find out what are 
the family frailties, and in arming the castle put the 
strongest guard at the weakest gate. With these 
smooth stones from the brook I hope to strike you, 
not where David struck Goliath, in the head, but 
where Nathan struck David, in the heart. 

First, I accost all those who are descended of a 
Christian ancestry. I do not ask if your parents were . 
perfect. There are no perfect people now, and I do 
not suppose the*re were any perfect people then. 
Perhaps there was sometimes too much blood in their 
eye when they chastised you. But from what I 
know of you, you got no more than you deserved, 
and perhaps a little more chastisement would have 
been salutary. But you are willing to acknowledge, 
I think, that they wanted to do right. From what 
you overheard in conversations, and from what you 
saw at the family altar and at neighborhood obse- 
quies, you know that they had invited God into their 
heart and life. There was something that sustained 
those old people supernaturally. You have no doubt 
about their destiny. You expect if you ever get to 
heaven to meet them as certainly as you expect to 
meet the Lord Jesus Christ. 

That early association has been a charm for you. 
There was a time when you got right up from a 
house of iniquity and walked out into the fresh air 
because you thought your mother was looking at 
you. You have never been very happy in sin, be- 



YOUR PEDIGREE. 



113 



cause of a sweet old face that would present itself. 
Tremulous voices from the past accosted you until 
they were seemingly audible, and you looked around 
to see who spoke. There was an estate not men- 
tioned in the last will and testament, a vast estate of 
prayer and holy example, and Christian entreaty, and 
glorious memory. The survivors of the family 
gathered to hear the will read, and this was to be 
kept, and that was to be sold, and it was share and 
share alike. But there was an unwritten will that 
read something like this: "In the name of God, 
Amen. I, being of sound mind, bequeath to my chil- 
dren all my prayers for their salvation ; I bequeath 
to them all the results of a lifetime's toil ; I bequeath 
to them the Christian religion which has been so 
much comfort to me, and I hope may be solace for 
them ; I bequeath to them a hope of reunion when 
the partings of life are over ; share, and share alike, 
may they have in eternal riches. I bequeath to them 
the wish that they may avoid my errors, and copy 
anything that may have been worthy. In the name 
of the God who made me, and the Christ who re- 
deemed me, and the Holy Ghost who sanctifies me, 
I make this my last will and testament. Witness, all 
ye hosts of heaven. Witness, time, witness, eternity. 
Signed, sealed, and delivered in this our dying hour. 
Father and Mother." 

You did not get that will proved at the Surrogate's 
office ; but I take it out to-day and I read it to you ; 
I take it out of the alcoves of your heart ; I shake the 
dust off of it, I ask 'you will you accept that inheri- 
tance, or will you break the will ? O ye of Christian 
ancestry, you have a responsibility vast beyond all 
measurement! God will not let you off with just 

8 



U4 YOUR PEDIGREE. 

being as good as ordinary people when you had such 
extraordinary advantage. Ought not a flower planted 
in a hot-house be more thrifty than a flower planted 
outside in the storm ? Ought not a factory turned 
by the Housatonic 'do more work than a factory 
turned by a thin and shallow mountain stream? 
Ought not you of great early opportunity be better 
than those who had a cradle unblessed ? 

A father sets his son up in business. He keeps an 
account of all of the expenditures. So much for 
store fixtures, so much for rent, so much for this, so 
much for that, and all the items aggregated, and the 
father expects the son to give an account. Your 
Heavenly Father charges against you all the advant- 
ages of a pious ancestry — so many prayers, so much 
Christian example, so many kind entreaties — all these 
gracious influences one tremendous aggregate, and 
He asks you for an account of it. Ought not you to 
be better than those who had no such advantages? 
Better have been a foundling picked up off the city 
commons than with such magnificent inheritance of 
consecration to turn out indifferently. 

Ought not you, my brother, to be better, having 
had Christian nurture than that man who can truly 
say this morning: " The first word I remember my 
father speaking to me was an oath ; the first time I 
remember my father taking hold of me was in wrath ; 
I never saw a Bible till I was ten years of age, and 
then I was told it was a pack of lies. The first 
twenty years of my life I was associated with the 
vicious. I seemed to be walled in by sin and death." 
Now, my brother, ought you not— I leave it as a mat- 
ter of fairness with you— ought you not to be far bet- 
ter than those who had no early Christian influence ? 



YOUR PEDIGREE. II 5 

Standing as you do between the generation that is 
past and the generation that is to come, are you 
going to pass the blessing on, or are you going to 
have your life the gulf in which that tide of blessing 
shall drop out of sight forever ? You are the trustee 
of piety in that ancestral line, and are you going to 
augment or squander that solemn trust fund? are 
you going to disinherit your sons and daughters of 
the heirloom which your parents left you? Ah ! that 
cannot be possible, that cannot be possible that you 
are going to take such a position as that. You are 
very careful about the life insurances, and careful 
about the deeds, and careful about the mortgages, 
and careful about the title of your property, because 
when you step off the stage you want your children 
to get it all. , Are you making no provision that they 
shall get grandfather and grandmother's religion? 
Oh, what a last will and testament you are making, 
my brother! " In the name of God, Amen. I, being 
of sound mind, make this my last will and testament. 
I bequeath to my children all the money I ever made, 
and ail the houses I own ; but I disinherit them, I rob 
them of the ancestral grace and the Christian influ- 
ence that I inherited. I have squandered that on my 
own worldliness. Share and share alike must they in 
the misfortune and the everlasting outrage. Signed, 
sealed, and delivered in the presence of God and 
men and angels and devils, and all the generations of 
earth and heaven and hell." 

O ye highly favored ancestry, wake up this morn- 
ing to a sense of your opportunity and your respon- 
sibility. I think there must be an old cradle, or a 
fragment of a cradle somewhere that could tell 
a story of midnight supplication in your behalf. 



l T 6 YOUR PEDIGREE. 

Where is the old rocking chair in which you were 
sung to sleep with the holy nursery rhyme? Where 
is the old clock that ticked away the moments of that 
sickness on that awful night when there were but 
three of you awake— you and God and mother ? Is 
there not an old staff in some closet? is there not an 
old family Bible on some shelf that seems to address 
you, saying : " My son, my daughter, how can you 
reject that God who so kindly dealt with us all our 
lives, and to whom we commend you in our prayers, 
living and dying ! By the memory of the old home- 
stead, by the family altar, by our dying pillow, by 
the graves in which our bodies sleep while our spirits 
hover, we beg you to turn over a new leaf." 

But I turn for a moment to those who had evil 
parentage, and I want to tell you that the highest 
thrones in heaven, and the mightiest triumphs, and 
the brightest crowns, will be for those who had evil 
parentage, but who by the grace of God conquered. 
As useful, as splendid a gentleman as I know of to- 
day, had for father a man who died blaspheming 
God, until the neighbors had to put their fingers in 
their ears to shut out the horror. One of the most 
consecrated and useful Christian ministers of to-day, 
was born of a drunken horse-jockey. Tide of evil 
tremendous in some families. It is like Niagara 
Rapids, and yet men have clung to a rock, and been 
rescued. 

There is a family in New York whose wealth has 
rolled up into many millions, that was founded by a 
man who, after he had vast estate, sent back a paper 
of tacks because they were two cents more than he 
expected. Grip, and grind, and gouge in the fourth 
generation— I suppose it will be grip, and grind, and 



YOUR PEDIGREE. 



117 



gouge in the twentieth generation. The thirst for in- 
toxicants has burned down through the arteries of a 
hundred and fifty years. Pugnacity or combative- 
ness characterize other families. Sometimes one 
form of evil, sometimes another form of evil. But it 
may be resisted, it has been resisted. If the family 
frailty be avarice, cultivate unselfishness and charity, 
and teach your children never to eat an apple with- 
out offering somebody else half of it. Is the family 
frailty combativeness, keep out of the company of 
quick-tempered people, a'nd never answer an imper- 
tinent question until you have counted a hundred 
both ways, and after you have written an angry let- 
ter keep it a week before you send it, and then burn 
it up ! Is the family frailty timidity and cowardice, 
cultivate backbone, read the biography of brave men 
like Joshua or Paul, and see if you cannot get a little 
iron in your blood. Find out what the family frailty 
is, and set body, mind, and soul in battle array. 

I think the genealogical table was put in the first 
chapter of the New Testament, not only to show our 
Lord's pedigree, but to show that a man may rise up 
in an ancestral line, and beat back successfully all the 
influences of bad heredity. See in that genealogical 
table that good King Asa came of vile King Abia. 
See in that genealogical table that Joseph and Mary, 
and the most illustrious Being that ever touched our 
world, or ever will touch it, had in their ancestral 
line scandalous Rheoboam, and Thamar, and Bath- 
sheba. If this world is ever to be«Edenized — and it 
will be — all the infected families of the earth are to 
be regenerated, and there will some one arise in each 
family line, and open a new genealogical table. 
There will be some Joseph in the line to reverse the 



H8 YOUR PEDIGREE. 

evil influence of Rheoboam, and there will be some 
Mary in the line to reverse the evil influence of 
Bathsheba. Perhaps the star of hope may point 
down to your manger. Perhaps you are to be the 
hero or the heroine that is to put down the brakes, 
and stop that long train of genealogical tendencies, 
and switch it off on another track from that on which 
it has been running for a century. You do that, and 
I will promise you as fine a palace as the architects 
of heaven can build, the archway inscribed with the 
words, " More than conqueror.' ' 

But whatever your heredity, let me say, you may 
be sons and daughters of the Lord God Almighty. 
Estranged children from the homestead come back 
through the open gate of adoption. There is royal 
blood in our veins. There are crowns on our 
escutcheon. Our Father is King. Our Brother is 
King. We may be kings and queens unto God for- 
ever. Come and sit down on the ivory bench of the 
palace. Come and wash in the fountains that fall 
into the basins of crystal and alabaster. Come and 
loak out of the upholstered window upon gardens of 
azalea and amaranth. Hear the full burst of the 
orchestra while you banquet with potentates and 
victors. Oh, when the text sweeps backward, let it 
not stop at the cradle that rocked your infancy, but 
at the cradle that rocked the first world, and when 
the text sweeps forward, let it not stop at your grave, 
but at the throne on whfch you may reign forever 
and ever. " Whose son art thou, thou young man? " 
Son of God ! Heir of mortality ? Take your in- 
heritance ? 



HOME. 

f After R. Bevsrhlao- 1 



CHAPTER X. 



HOME. 

There are a great many people longing for some 
grand sphere in which to serve God. They admire 
Luther at the Diet of Worms, and only wish that 
they had some such great opportunity in which to 
display their Christian prowess. They admire Paul 
making Felix tremble, and they only wish that they 
had some such grand occasion in which to preach 
righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come. 
All they want is only an opportunity to exhibit their 
Christian heroism. Now, the Apostle comes to us and 
he practically says : " I will show you a place where 
you can exhibit all that is grand and beautiful and 
glorious in Christian character, and that is, the do- 
mestic circle." Let them learn first to show piety at 
home. 

If one is not faithful in an insignificant sphere, he 
will not be faithful in a resounding sphere. If Peter 
will not help the cripple at the gate of the temple he 
will never be able to preach three thousand into the 
kingdom at the Pentecost. If Paul will not take pains 
to instruct in the way of salvation the jailor of the 
Philippian dungeon, he will never make Felix trem- 
ble. He who is not faithful in a skirmish would not 
be faithful in an Armageddon. 

The fact is, we are all placed in just the position in 
which we can most grandly serve God ; and we 

121 



122 



HOME. 



ought not to be chiefly thoughtful about some sphere 
of usefulness which we may after awhile gain, but 
the all-absorbing question with you and with me 
ought to be : " Lord, what wilt Thou have me now 
and here to do?" 

Home. Ask ten different men the meaning of that 
word and they will give you ten different definitions. 
To one it means love at the hearth, it means plenty 
at the table, industry at the workstand, intelligence at 
the books, devotion at the altar. In that household 
Discord never sounds its warwhoop and Deception 
never tricks with its false face. To him it means a 
greeting at the door and a smile at the chair, Peace 
hovering like wings, Joy clapping its hands with 
laughter. Life a tranquil lake. Pillowed on the rip- 
ples sleep the shadows. 

Ask another man what home is, and he will tell you 
it is Want looking out of a cheerless fire-grate, needy 
hunger in an empty bread-tray. The damp air shiv- 
ering with curses. No Bible on the shelf. Children 
robbers and murderers in embryo. Obscene songs 
their lullaby. Every face a picture of ruin. Want 
in the background and sin staring from the front. No 
Sabbath wave rolling over that doorsill. Vestibule of 
the pit. Shadow of infernal walls. Furnace for forg- 
ing everlasting chains. Faggots for an unending fu- 
neral pile. Awful word. It is spelled with curses, it 
weeps with ruin, it chokes with woe, it sweats with 
the death agony of despair. The word " home " in 
the one case means everything bright. The word 
" home " in the other case means everything terrific. 

Home is a powerful test of character. The dispo- 
sition in public may be to gay costume, while in pri- 
vate it is to dishabille. As play actors may appear in 



HOME. 



123 



one way on the stage and may appear in another way 
behind the scenes, so private character may be very 
different from public character. Private character is 
often public character turned inside out. A man 
may receive you into his parlor as though he were a 
distillation of smiles, and yet his heart may be a 
swamp of nettles. There are business men who all 
day long are mild and courteous and genial and good- 
natured in commercial life, damming back their irri- 
tability and their petulance and their discontent, but 
at nightfall the dam breaks, and scolding pours forth 
in floods and freshets. 

Reputation is only the shadow of character, and a 
very small house sometimes will cast a very long 
shadow. The lips may seem to drop with myrrh 
and cassia, and the disposition to be as bright and 
warm as a sheaf of sunbeams, and yet they may only 
be a magnificent show window, but a wretched stock 
of goods. There is many a man who is affable in 
public life and amid commercial spheres, who, in a 
cowardly way, takes his anger and his petulance 
home and drops them on the domestic circle. 

The reason men do not display their bad temper in 
public is because they do not want to be knocked 
down. There are men who hide their petulance and 
their irritability just for the same reason that they do 
not let their notes go to protest; it does not pay. Or, 
for the same reason that they do not want a man in 
their stock company to sell his stock at less than the 
right price lest it depreciate the value. As at sunset 
sometimes the wind rises, so after a sunshiny day 
there may be a tempestuous night. There are peo- 
ple who in public act the philanthropist, who at home 
act the Nero, with respect to their slippers and their 
gown. 



124 HOME. 

Audubon, the great ornithologist, with gun and 
pencil, went through the forests of America to bring 
down and to sketch the beautiful birds, and after 
years of toil and exposure completed his manuscript 
and put it in a trunk in Philadelphia, and went off for 
a few days of recreation and rest, and came back and 
found that the rats had utterly destroyed the manu- 
script ; but without any discomposure and without 
any fret or bad temper, he again picked up his gun 
and his pencil, and visited again all the great forests 
of America and reproduced his immortal work. And 
yet there are people with the ten-thousandth part of 
that )oss who are utterly irreconcilable, who, at the 
loss of a pencil or an article of raiment, will blow as 
long and loud and sharp as a northeast storm. 

Now, that man who is affable in public and who is 
irritable in private is making a fraudulent and over- 
issue of stock, and he is as bad as a bank that might 
have four or five hundred thousand dollars of bills in 
circulation and no specie in the vault. Let us learn 
to show piety at home. If we have it not there, we 
have it not anywhere. If we have not genuine grace 
in the family circle, all our outward and public plaus- 
ibility merely springs from a fear of the world, or 
from the slimy, putrid pool of our own selfishness. I 
tell you the home is a mighty test of character. 
What you are at home you are everywhere, whether 
you demonstrate it or not. 

Again, home is a refuge. Life is the United States 
army on the national road to Mexico, a long march 
with ever and anon a skirmish and a battle. At 
eventide we pitch our tent and stack the arms, we 
hang up the war cap, and, our head on the knapsack, 
we sleep until the morning bugle calls us to march 



HOME. 



125 



to the action. How pleasant it is to rehearse the vic- 
tories and the surprises and the attacks of the day, 
seated by the still camp-fire of the home circle. 

Yet life is a stormy sea. With shivered masts and 
torn sails, and hulk aleak, we put in at the harbor of 
home. Blessed harbor ! There we go for repairs in 
the dry dock. The candle in the window is to the 
toiling man the lighthouse guiding him into port. 
Children go forth to meet their fathers as pilots at 
the "Narrows" take the hand of ships. The door-sill 
of the home is the wharf where heavy life is unladen. 

There is the place where we may talk of what we 
have done without being charged with self-adulation. 
There is the place where we may lounge without 
being thought ungraceful. There is the place where 
we may express gratification without being thought 
silly. There is the place where we may forget our 
annoyances, and exasperations, and troubles. For- 
lorn earth, pilgrim, no home? Then die. That is 
better. The grave is brighter, and grander, and 
more glorious than this world with no tent from 
marching, with no harbor from the storm, with no 
place of rest from the scene of greed and gouge, and 
loss and gain. God pity the man or the woman who 
has no home. 

Further, I remark, that home is a political safe- 
guard. The safety of the State must be built on the 
safety of the home. Why can not France come to a 
placid republic? McMahon appoints his ministry, 
and all France is aquake lest the republic be 
smothered. Gambetta dies, and there are hundreds 
of thousands of Frenchmen who are fearing the 
return of a monarchy. France as a nation has not 
the right kind of a Christian home. 



126 



HOME. 



The Christian hearth-stone is the only hearth-stone 
for a republic. The virtues cultured in the family 
circle are an absolute necessity for the State. If 
there be not enough moral principle to make the 
family adhere, there will not be enough political 
principle to make the State adhere. No home means 
the Goths and Vandals, means the Nomads of Asia, 
means the Numidians of Africa changing from place, 
according as the pasture happens to change. Con- 
founded be all those Babels of iniquity which would 
overpower and destroy the home. The same storm 
that upsets the ship in which the family sails will 
sink the frigate of the constitution. Jails, and peni- 
tentiaries, and armies, and navies, are not our best 
defence. The door of the home is the best fortress. 
Household utensils are the best artillery, and the 
chimnevs of our dwelling houses are the grandest 
monuments of safety and triumph. No home, no 
republic. 

Home is a school. Old ground must be turned up 
with subsoil plow, and it must be harrowed and re- 
harrowed, and then the crop will not be as large as 
that of the new ground with less culture. Now, 
youth and childhood are new ground and all the 
influences thrown over their heart and life will come 
up in after life luxuriantly. ' 

Every time you have given a smile of approba- 
tion — all the good cheer of your life will come up 
again in the geniality of your children. And every 
ebullition of anger, and every uncontrollable display 
of indignation will be fuel to their disposition twenty 
or thirty, or forty years from now — fuel for a bad 
fire quarter of a century from this. You praise the 
intelligence of your child too much sometimes, when 



DEATH ON THE PALE HORSE. 



HOME. 



129 



you think he is not aware of it, and you will see the 
results of it before ten years of age, in his annoying 
affectations. You praise his beauty, supposing he is 
not large enough to understand what you say, and 
you will find him standing on a- high chair before a 
flattering mirror. 

Words, and deeds, and example are the seed of 
character, and children are very apt to be the second 
edition of their parents. Abraham begat Isaac, so 
virtue is apt to go down in the ancestral line ; but 
Herod begat Archelaus, so iniquity is transmitted. 
What vast responsibility comes upon parents in view 
of this subject. 

Oh, make your home the brightest place on earth 
if you would charm your children to the high path 
of virtue, and rectitude, and religion. Do not always 
turn the blinds the wrong way. Let the light, which 
puts gold on the gentian and spots the pansy, pour 
into your dwellings. Do not expect the little feet to 
keep step to a dead march. Do not cover up your 
walls with such pictures as West's " Death on a Pale 
Horse," or Tintoretto's "Massacre of the Innocents." 
Rather cover them, if you have pictures, with "The 
Hawking Party," and "The Mill by the Mountain 
Stream," and "The Fox Hunt," and "The Children 
Amid Flowers," and "The Harvest Scene," and "The 
Saturday Night Marketing." 

Get you no hint of cheerfulness from grasshopper's 
leap, and lamb's frisk, and' quail's whistle, and gar- 
rulous streamlet, which, from the rock at the moun- 
tain top clear down to the meadow ferns under the 
shadow of the steep, comes looking to see where it 
can find the steepest place to leap off at, and talking 
just to hear itself talk. If all the skies hustled with 

9 



130 



HOME. 



tempest, and everlasting storm wandered over the 
sea, and every mountain stream were raving mad, 
frothing at the mouth with mud foam, and there were 
nothing but simooms blowing among the hills, and 
there were neither lark's carol nor humming-bird's 
trill, nor waterfall's dash, but only bear's bark and 
panther's scream and wolf's howl, then you might 
well gather into your homes only the shadows. But 
when God has strewn the earth and the heavens with 
beauty and with gladness, let us take into our home 
circles all innocent hilarity, all brightness, and all 
good cheer. A dark home makes bad boys and bad 
girls, in preparation for bad men and bad women. 



CHAPTER XL 



IS LIFE WORTH LIVING ? 

If we leave to the evolutionists to guess where we 
came from and to the theologians to prophecy where 
we are going to, we will have left for consideration 
the important fact that we are here. There may be 
some doubt about where the river rises and some 
doubt about where the river empties, but there can 
be no doubt about the fact that we are sailing on it. 
So I am not surprised that everybody asks the ques- 
tion, " Is life worth living?" Here is a young man of 
light hair and blue eyes, and sound digestion, and gen- 
erous salary, and happily affianced, and on the way to 
become a partner in a commercial firm of which he is 
an important clerk. Ask him whether life is worth 
living. He will laugh in your face and say, " Yes, 
yes, yes ! " Here is a man who has come to the for- 
ties. He is at the tip-top of the hill of life. Every 
step has been a stumble and a bruise. The people he 
trusted have turned out deserters, and the money he 
has honestly made he has been cheated out of. His 
nerves are out of tune. He has poor appetite, and all 
the food he does eat does not assimilate. Forty miles 
climbing up the hill of life have been to him like 
climbing the Matterhorn, and there are forty miles 
yet to go down, and descent is always more danger- 
ous than ascent. Ask him whether life is worth 

131 



132 



IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 



living, and he will drawl out in shivering and lugu- 
brious, an appalling negative, " No, no, no ! " 

How are we to decide this matter righteously and 
intelligently ? You will find the same man vacillat- 
ing, oscillating in his opinion from dejection to exub- 
erance, and if he be very mercurial in his temperament 
it will depend very much upon which way the wind 
blows. If the wind blow from the northwest, and you 
ask him, he will say, "Yes ;" and if it blow from the 
northeast, and you ask him, he will say, "No." How 
are we then to get the question righteously answered ? 
Suppose we call all nations together in a great con- 
vention on Eastern or Western hemisphere, and let all 
those who are in the affirmative, say, "Aye," and all 
those who are in the negative, say, " No." While 
there would be hundreds of thousands who would 
answer in the affirmative, there would be more mil- 
lions who would answer in the negative, and because 
of the greater number who have sorrow and misfor- 
tune and trouble, the " Noes " would have it. If you 
ask me, " Is life worth living?" I answer, it all depends 
upon the kind of life you live. 

In the first place, I remark that a life of mere money- 
getting is always a failure, because you will never 
get as much as you want. The poorest people in this 
country are the millionaires, and next to them those 
who r^ave half a million. There is not a scissors- 
grinder on the streets of New York or Brooklyn that 
is so anxious to make money as these men who have 
piled up fortunes year after year in storehouses, in 
government securities, in tenement houses, in whole 
city blocks. You ought to see them jump when they 
hear the fire-bell ring. You ought to see them in 
their excitement when Marine Bank explodes. You 



IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 



133 



ought to see their agitation when there is proposed a 
reformation in the tariff. Their nerves tremble like 
harp-strings, but no music in the vibration. They 
read the reports from Wall Street in the morning 
with a concernment that threatens paralysis or ap- 
oplexy, or, more probably, they have a telegraph or a 
telephone in their own house, so they catch every 
breath of change in the money market. The disease 
of accumulation has eaten into them — eaten into their 
heart, into their lungs, into their spleen, into their 
liver, into their bones. 

That is not a life worth living. There are too many 
earthquakes in it, too many agonies in it, too many 
perditions in it. They build their castles, and they 
open their picture galleries, and they summon prima 
donnas, and they offer every inducement for happiness 
to come and live there, but happiness will not come. 

They send footmaned and postillioned equipage to 
bring her ; she will not ride to their door. They send 
princely escort ; she will not take their arm. They 
make their gateways triumphal arches ; she will not 
ride under them. They set a golden throne before a 
golden plate ; she turns away from the banquet. They 
call to her from upholstered balcony ; she will not 
listen. Mark you, this is the failure of those who 
have had large accumulation. 

And then you must take into consideration that the 
vast majority of those who make the dominant idea 
of life money-getting, fall far short of affluence. It is 
estimated that only about two out of a hundred busi- 
ness men have anything worthy the name of success. 
A man who spends his life with the one dominant 
idea of financial accumulation spends a life not worth 
living. 



134 IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 

So the idea of worldly approval. If that be dom- 
inant in a man's life he is miserable. Now, that is 
not a life worth living. You can get slandered and 
abused cheaper than that ! 

Take it on a smaller scale. Do not be so ambitious 
to have a whole reservoir rolled over on you. But 
what you see in the matter of high political prefer- 
ment you see in ever) 7 community in the struggle for 
what is called social position. 

Tens of thousands of people trying to get into that 
realm, and they are under terrific tension. What is 
social position ? It is a difficult thing to define, but 
we all know what it is. Good morals and intelli- 
gence are not necessary, but wealth, or the show of 
wealth, is absolutely indispensable. There are men 
to-day as notorious for their libertinism as the night 
is famous for its darkness, who move in what is called 
high social position. There are hundreds of out-and- 
out rakes in American society whose names are men- 
tioned among the distinguished guests at the great 
levees. They have annexed all the known vices, and 
are longing for other worlds of diabolism to conquer. 
Good morals are not necessary in many of the exalted 
circles of society. 

Neither is intelligence necessary. You find in that 
realm men who would not know an adverb from an 
adjective if they met it a hundred times a day, and 
who could not write a letter of acceptance or regret 
without the aid of a secretary. They buy their lib- 
raries by the square yard, only anxious to have the 
binding Russia. Their ignorance is positively sub- 
lime, making English grammar almost disreputable. 
And yet the finest parlors open before them. Good 
morals and intelligence are not necessary, but wealth, 



IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 



135 



or a show of wealth, is positively indispensable. It 
does not make any difference how you got your 
wealth if you only got it. Perhaps you got it by fail- 
ing four or five times. It is the most rapid way of ac- 
cumulation in this country — that is, the quickest way 
to get in social position. Those who fail only once 
are not very well off, but by the time a man has failed 
the second time he is comfortable, and by the time 
he has failed the third time he is affluent. The best 
way for you to get into social position is for you to 
buy a large amount on credit, then put your property 
in your wife's name, have a few preferred creditors, 
and then make an assignment. Then disappear from 
the community until the breeze is over, and then 
come back and start in the same business. Do you 
not see how beautifully that will put out all the peo- 
ple who are in competition with you and trying to 
make an honest living ? < How quick it will get you 
into high social position ? What is the use of toiling 
with forty or fifty years of hard work when you can 
by two or three bright strokes make' a great fortune. 
Ah ! my friends, when you really lose your money 
how quick they will let you drop, and the higher you 
get the harder you will drop. 

There are thousands to-day in that realm who are 
anxious to keep in it. There are thousands in that 
realm who are nervous for fear they will fall out of it, 
and there are changes going on every year, and every 
month, and every hour, which involve heartbreaks 
that are never reported. High social life is constant- 
ly in a nutter about the delicate question as to whom 
they shall let in, and whom they shall push out, and 
the battle is going on — pier mirror against pier mirror, 
chandelier against chandelier, wine cellar against 



I3 6 IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 

wine cellar, wardrobe against wardrobe, equipage 
against equipage. Uncertainty and insecurity dom- 
inant in that realm, wretchedness enthroned, torture 
at a premium, and a life not worth living. 

A life of sin, a life of pride, a life of indulgence, a 
life of worldliness, a life devoted to the world, the 
flesh, and the devil is a failure, a dead failure, an in- 
finite failure. I care not how many presents you 
send to that cradle, or how many garlands you send 
to that grave, you need to put right under the name 
on the tombstone this inscription : " Better for that 
man if he had never been born." 

But I shall show you a life that is worth living. A 
young man says : " I am here. I am not responsible 
for my ancestry; others decided that. I am not respon- 
sible for my temperament ; God gave me that. But 
here I am, in the afternoon of the nineteenth century, 
at twenty years of age. I am here, and I must take 
an account of stock. . Kere I have a body which is a 
divinely constructed engine. I must put it to the 
very best uses, and I must allow nothing to damage 
this rarest of machinery. Two feet, and they mean 
locomotion. Two eyes, and they mean capacity to 
pick out my own way. Two ears, and they are tele- 
phones of communication with all the outside world, 
and they mean capacity to catch sweetest music and 
the voices of friendship — the very best music. A 
tongue, with almost infinity of articulation. Yes, hands 
with which to welcome, or resist, or lift, or smite, or 
wave, or bless— hands to help myself and help others. 

" Here is a word which, after six thousand years of 
battling with tempest and accident, is still grander 
than any architect, human or angelic, could have 
drafted. I have two lamps to light me — a golden 



IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? ♦ 1 37 

lamp and a silver lamp — a golden lamp set on the sap- 
phire mantel of the day, a silver lamp set on the jet 
mantle of the night. Yea, I have that at twenty 
years of age which defies all inventory of valuables — 
a soul, with capacity to choose or reject, to rejoice 
or to suffer, to love or to hate. Plato says it is im- 
mortal? Seneca says it is immortal. Confucius says 
it is immortal. An old book among the family relics — 
a book with leathern cover almost worn out, and 
pages almost obliterated by oft perusal, joins to the 
other books in saying I am immortal. I have eighty 
years for a lifetime, sixty years yet to live. I may 
not live an hour, but then I must lay out my plans 
intelligently and for a long life. Sixty years added 
to the twenty I have already lived, that will bring 
me to eighty. I must remember that these eighty 
years are only a brief preface to the five hundred 
thousand millions of quintillions of years which will 
be my chief residence and existence. Now, I under- 
stand my opportunities and my responsibilities. 

" If there is any being in the universe all wise and 
all beneficent who can help a man in such a juncture, 
I want him. The old book found among the family 
relics tells me there is a God, and that for the sake of 
His Son, one Jesus, He will give help to a man, To 
Him I appeal. God help me ! Here, I have sixty 
years yet to do for myself and to do for others. I 
must develop this body by all industries, by all gym- 
nastics, by all sunshine, by all fresh air, by all good 
habits. Arid this soul I must have swept, and gar- 
nished, and illumined, and glorified by all that I can 
do for it and all that I can get God to do for it. It 
shall be a Luxembourg of fine pictures. It shall be 
an orchestra of grand harmonies. It shall be.a palace 



138 . IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 

for God and righteousness to reign in. I wonder 
how many kind words I can utter in the next sixty 
years? I will try. I wonder how many good deeds 
I can do in the next sixty years ? I will try. God 
help me ! " 

That young man enters life. He is buffeted, he is 
tried, he is perplexed. A grave opens on tkis side 
and a grave opens on that side. He falls, but he 
rises again. He gets into a hard battle, but he gets 
the victory. The main course of his life is in. the 
right direction. He blesses everybody he comes in 
contact with. God forgives his mistakes, and makes 
everlasting record of his holy endeavors, and at the 
close of it God says to him : " Well done, good and 
faithful servant; enter into the joys of thy Lord." 
My brother, my sister, I do not care whether that 
man dies at thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, or eighty 
years of age ; you can chisel right under his name on 
the tombstone these words, " His life was worth 
living." 

I would not find it hard to persuade you that the 
poor lad, Peter Cooper, making glue for a living, and 
then amassing a great fortune until he could build a 
philanthropy which has had its echo in ten thousand 
philanthropies all over the country — I would not find 
it hard to persuade you that his life was worth living. 
Neither would I find it hard to persuade you that 
the life of Susannah Wesley was worth living. She 
sent out one son to organize Methodism and the other 
son to ring his anthems all through the ages. I 
would not find it hard work to persuade you that the 
life of Frances Leere was worth living, as she estab- 
lished in England a school for the scientific nursing 
of the sick, and then when the war broke out be- 



IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 



139 



tween France and Germany, went to the front, and 
with her own hands scraped the mud off the bodies 
of the soldiers dying in the trenches, and with her 
weak arm — standing one night in the hospital — push- 
ing back a German soldier to his couch, as, all frenzied 
with his wounds, he rushed toward the door, and said : 
" Let me go, let me go to my liebe mutter." Major-gen- 
erals standing back to let pass this angel of mercy. 

Neither would I have hard work to persuade you 
that Grace Darling lived a life worth living — the 
heroine of the lifeboat. You say : " While I know 
all these lived lives worth living, I don't think my 
life amounts to much." Ah! my friends, whether 
you live a life conspicuous or inconspicuous, it is 
worth living, if you live aright. And I want my 
next sentence to go down into the depths of all your 
souls. You are to be rewarded, not according to the 
greatness of your work, but according to the holy 
industries with which you employed the talents you 
really possessed. The majority of the crowns of 
heaven will not be given to people with ten talents, 
for most of them were tempted only to serve them- 
selves. The vast majority of the crowns of heaven 
will be given to people who had one talent, but gave 
it all to God. And remember that our life here is 
introductory to another. It is the vestibule to a pal- 
ace ; but who despises the door of a Madeleine be- 
cause there are grander glories within ? Your life if 
rightly lived is the first bar of an eternal oratorio, 
and who despises the first note of Haydn's sym- 
phonies ? And the life you live now is all the more 
worth living because it opens into a life that shall 
never end, and the last letter of the word, "time" is 
the first letter of the word "eternity ! " 



CHAPTER XII. 



SOLICITUDE. 

The first cause of parental solicitude, I think, arises 
from the imperfection of parents on their own part. 
We all somehow want our children to avoid our 
faults. We hope that if we have any excellencies 
they will copy them ; but the probability is they will 
copy our faults, and omit our excellencies. Children 
are very apt to be echoes of the parental life. Some 
one meets a lad in the back street, finds him smok- 
ing, and says : " Why, I am astonished at you ; what 
would your father say if he knew this? where did 
you get that cigar?" "Oh, I picked it up on the 
street." " What would your father say, and your 
mother say, if they knew this?" "Oh," he replies, 
" that's nothing, my father smokes ! " There is not 
one of us to-day, who would like to have our children 
copy all our example. And that is the cause of solici- 
tude on the part of all of us. We have so many 
faults we do not want them copied and stereotyped 
in the lives and characters of those who come 
after us. 

Then solicitude arises from our conscious insuffi- 
ciency and unwisdom of discipline. Out of twenty 
parents there may be one parent who understands 
how thoroughly and skillfully to discipline ; perhaps 
not more than one out of twenty. We, nearly all of 
us, are on one side or are on the other. 

140 



SOLICITUDE. 



141 



Here is a father who says : " I am going to bring 
up my children right ; my sons shall know nothing 
but religion, shall see nothing but religion, and hear 
nothing but religion." They are routed at 6 o'clock 
in the morning to recite the Ten Commandments. 
They are wakened up from the sofa on Sunday night 
to recite the Westminster catechism. Their bedroom 
walls are covered with religious pictures and quota- 
tions of Scripture, and when the boy looks for the 
day of the month he looks for it in a religious alma- 
nac. If a minister comes to the house he is requested 
to take the boy aside, and tell him what a great sinner 
he is. It is religion morning, noon and night. 

Time passes on, and the parents are waiting for the • 
return of the son at night. It is 9 o'clock, it is 10 
o'clock, it is 11 o'clock, it is 12 o'clock, it is half-past 
12 o'clock. Then they hear a rattling of the night- 
key, and George comes in and hastens upstairs lest 
he be accosted. His father says: " George, where 
have you been ? " He says : " I have been out." 
Yes, he has been out, and he has been down, and he 
has started on the broad road to ruin for this life and 
ruin for the life to come, and the father says to his 
wife : " Mother, the Ten Commandments are a fail- 
ure ; no use of Westminster Catechism ; I have done 
my very best for that boy ; just see how he has 
turned out." Ah ! my friend, you stuffed that boy 
with religion, you had no sympathy with innocent 
hilarities, you had no common sense. 

A man at mid-life said to me : " I haven't much de- 
sire for religion ; my father was as good a man as 
ever lived, but he jammed religion down my throat 
when I was a boy until I got disgusted with it, and I 
haven't wanted any of it since." That father erred 
on one side. 



142 SOLICITUDE. 

Then the discipline is an entire failure in many 
households because the father pulls one way and the 
mother pulls the other way. The father says : " My 
son, I told you if I ever found you guilty of falsehood 
again I would chastise you, and I am going to keep 
my promise." The mother says: " Don't; let him 
off this time." 

A father says: "I have seen so many that make 
mistakes by too great severity in the rearing of their 
children ; now, I will let my boy do as he pleases ; he 
shall have full swing ; here, my son, are tickets to the 
theatre and opera ; if you want to play cards, do so ; 
if you don't want to play cards you need not play 
* them ; go when you want to and come back when 
you want to ; have a good time ; go it ! " Plenty of 
money for the most part, and give a boy plenty of 
money, and ask him not what he does with it, and 
you pay his way straight to perdition. But after a 
while the lad thinks he ought to have a still larger 
supply. He has been treated, and he must treat. 
He must have wine suppers. There are larger and 
larger expenses. 

After a while, one day a messenger from the bank 
over the way calls in and says to the father of the 
household of which I am speaking: " The officers of 
the bank would like to have you step over a minute." 
The father steps over and the bank officer says : " Is 
that your check?" " No," he says, "that is not my 
check ; I never make an ' H ' in that way, and I never 
put a curl to the ' Y ' in that way ; that is not my 
writing ; that is not my signature ; that is a counter- 
feit ; send for the police." "Stop," says the bank 
officer, " your son wrote that." 

Now the father and mother are waiting for the son 



SOLICITUDE. 



143 



to come home at night. It is 12 o'clock, it is half- 
past 12 o'clock, it is 1 o'clock. The son comes 
through the hallway. The father says ; " My son, 
what does all this mean ? I gave you every oppor- 
tunity, I gave you all the money you wanted, and 
here in my old days I find that you have become a 
spendthrift, a libertine, and a sot." The son says: 
" Now, father, what is the use of your talking that 
way? You told me to go it, and I just took your 
suggestion." And so to strike the medium between 
severity and too great leniency, to strike the happy 
medium between the two and to train our children 
for God and for heaven, is the anxiety of every intel- 
ligent parent. 

Another great anxiety, great solicitude, is in the 
fact that so early is developed childish sinfulness. 
Morning glories put out their bloom in the early part 
of the day, but as the hot sun comes on they close up. 
While there are other flowers that blaze their beauty 
along the Amazon for a week at a time without clos- 
ing, yet the morning glory does its work as certainly 
as Victoria regia ; so there are some children that 
just put forth their bloom, and they close, and they 
are gone. There is something supernatural about 
them while they tarry, and there is an ethereal ap- 
pearance about them. There is a wonderful depth to 
their eye, and they are gone. They are too delicate 
a plant for this world. The Heavenly Gardener sees 
them, and He takes them in. 

But for the most part, the children that live some- 
times get cross, and pick up bad words in the street, 
or are disposed to quarrel with brother or sister, and 
show that they are wicked. You see them in the 
Sabbath-school class. They are so sunshiny and 



144 SOLICITUDE. 

bright you would think they were always so ; but the 
mother, looking over at them, remembers what an 
awful time she had to get them ready. Time passes 
on. They get considerably older, and the son comes 
in from the street, from a pugilistic encounter, bear- 
ing on his appearance the marks of defeat, or the 
daughter practices some little deception in the house- 
hold. The mother says : " I can't always be scold- 
ing, and fretting, and finding fault, but this must be 
stopped." So in many a household there is the sign 
of sin, the sign of the heart's being wrong, the sign of 
the truthfulness of what the Bible says when it de- 
clares, " They go astray as soon as they be born, 
speaking lies." 

Some go to work, and try to correct all this, and 
the boy is picked at, and picked at, and picked at. 
That always is ruinous. There is more help in one 
good thunderstorm, than in five days of cold drizzle. 
Better the old-fashioned style of chastisement, if that 
be necessary, than the fretting, and the scolding, 
which have destroyed so many. 

There is also the cause of great solicitude some- 
times because our young people are surrounded by 
so many temptations. A castle may not be taken by 
a straightforward siege, but suppose there be inside 
the castle an enemy, and in the night he shoves back 
the bolt, and swings open 'the door? Our young 
folks have foes without, and they have foes within. 
Who does not understand it? Who is the man here 
who is not aware of the fact that the young people of 
this day have tremendous temptations ? 

Some man will come to the young people, and try 
to persuade them that purity, and honesty, and up- 
rightness are a sign of weakness. Some man will 



SOLICITUDE. I45 

take a dramatic attitude, and he will talk to the 
young man, and he will say : " You must break 
away from your mother's apron-string ; you must get 
out of that Puritanical straight-jacket ; it is time you 
were your own master ; you are verdant ; you are 
green ; you are unsophisticated ; come with me, I'll 
show you the world ; I'll show you life ; come with 
me ; you need to see the world ; it won't hurt you." 
After a while the young man says, " Well, I can't 
afford to be odd, I can't afford to be peculiar, I can't 
afford to sacrifice all my friends ; I'll just go and see 
for myself." Farewell to innocence, which once 
gone, never fully comes back. Do not be under 
the delusion that because you repent of sin you 
get rid forever of its consequences. I say farewell 
to innocence, which once gone never fully comes 
back. 

Oh, how many traps set for the young ! Styles of 
temptation just suited to them. Do you suppose 
that a man who went clear to the depths of dissipa- 
tion, went down in one great plunge ? Oh, no ! At 
first it was a fashionable hotel. Marble floor. No 
unclean pictures behind the counter. No drunken 
hiccough while they drink, but the click of cut glass 
to the elegant sentiment. You ask that young man 
now to go into some low restaurant, and get a drink, 
and he would say, " Do you mean to insult me ?" 
But the fashionable and the elegant hotel is not 
always close by, and now the young man is on the 
down grade. Further and further down until he has 
about struck the bottom of the depths of ruin. Now, 
he is in the low restaurant. The cards so greasy you 
can hardly tell who has the best hand. Gambling 
for drinks. Shuffle away, shuffle away. The land- 

10 



I 4 6 SOLICITUDE. 

lord stands-in his shirt-sleeves, with his hands on his 
hips, waiting for an order to fill up the glasses. 

The clock strikes twelve— the tolling of the funeral 
bell of a soul. The breath of eternal woe flushes in 
that young man's cheek. In the jets of the gaslight 
the fiery tongue of the worm that never dies. Two 
o'clock in the morning, and now they are sound 
asleep in their chair. Landlord comes around and 
says, " Wake up, wake up ! time to shut up !" 
" What ! " says the young man. " Time to shut up." 
Push them all out into the night air. Now they are 
ofoins: home. Going: home ! Let the wife crouch in 
the corner and the children hide under the bed. 
What was the history of that young man? He 
began his dissipations in the bar-room of a Fifth Ave- 
nue Hotel, and completed his damnation in the low- 
est grog-shop on Atlantic Street. 

Sometimes sin does not halt in that way. Some- 
times sin even comes to the drawing-room. There 
are leprous hearts sometimes admitted in the highest 
circles of society. He is so elegant, he is so bewitch- 
ing in his manner, he is so refined, he is so educated, 
no one supects the sinful design ; but after a while 
the talons of death come forth. What is the matter 
with that house ? The front windows have not been 
open for six months or a year. A shadow has come 
down on that domestic hearth, a shadow thicker than 
one woven of midnight and hurricane. The agony 
of that parent makes him say : " Oh, I wish I had 
buried my children when they were small!" Loss of 
property? No. Death in the family? No. Mad- 
ness ? No. Some villain, kid-gloved and diamonded, 
lifted that cup of domestic bliss until the sunlight 
struck it, and all the rainbows played around the rim, 



SOLICITUDE. 



147 



and then dashed it into desolation and woe, until the 
harpies of darkness clapped their hands, and all the 
voices of the pit uttered a loud " Ha ! ha ! " 

The statistic has never been made up in these great 
cities of how many have been destroyed, and how 
many beautiful homes have been overthrown. If the 
statistic could be presented, it would freeze your 
blood in a solid cake at your heart. Our great cities 
are full of temptations, and to vast multitudes of par- 
ents these temptations become a matter of great 
solicitude. 

But now for the alleviations. First of all, you save 
yourself a great deal of trouble, Oh, parent, if you 
can early watch the children and educate them for 
God and heaven ! " The first five years of my life 
made me. an infidel," said Tom Paine. 

A vessel puts out to sea, and after it has been five 
days out there comes a cyclone. The vessel springs 
a leak. The helm will not work. What is the mat- 
ter? It is not seaworthy. It never was seaworthy. 
Can you mend it now ? It is too late. Down she 
goes with 250 passengers into a watery grave. What 
was the time to fix that vessel ? What was the time 
to prepare it for the storm ? In the dry dock. Ah, 
my friends, do not wait until your children get out 
into the world, beyond the Narrow x s and out on the 
great voyage of life ! It is too late then to mend 
their morals and their manners. The dry dock of the 
Christian home is the place. Correct the sin now, 
correct the evil now. 

Just look at the character of your children now 
and get an intimation of what they are going to be. 
You can tell by the way that boy divides the apple 
what his proclivity is and what his sin will be, and 



148 SOLICITUDE. 

what style of discipline you ought to bring upon 
him. You let that disposition go. You see how he 
divides that apple? He takes nine-tenths of it for 
himself, and he gives one-tenth to his sister. Well, 
let that go, and all his life he will want the best part 
of everything, and he will be grinding and grasping 
to the day of his death. Begin early with your chil- 
dren. You stand on the banks of a river and you try 
to change its course. It has been rolling now for a 
hundred miles. You cannot change it. But just go 
to the source of that river, go to where the water just 
drips down on the rock. Then with your knife make 
a channel this way and a channel that way, and it 
will take it. Come out and stand on the banks of 
your child's life when it is thirty or forty years of 
age, or even twenty, and try to change the course of 
that life. It is too late ! It is too late ! Go further 
up at the source of life and nearest to the mother's 
heart where the character starts, and try to take it in 
the right direction. 

But oh, my friend, be careful to make a line, a dis- 
tinct line between innocent hilarity on the one hand 
and vicious proclivity on the other. Do not think 
your children are going to ruin because they make a 
racket. All healthy children make a racket. But do 
not laugh at your child's sin because it is smart. If 
you do, you will cry after awhile because it is mali- 
cious. Rebuke the very first appearance of sin. Now 
is your time. Do not begin too late. 

Remember it is what you do more than what you 
say that is going to affect your children. Do you 
suppose Noah would have got his family to go into 
the ark if he staid out ? No. His sons would have 
said: "I am not going into the boat; there's some- 



SOLICITUDE. 



149 



thing wrong ; father won't go in ; if father stays out, 
I'll stay out." An officer may stand in a castle and 
look off upon an army fighting ; but he cannot be 
much of an officer, he cannot excite much enthusiasm 
on the part of his troops, standing in a castle or on a 
hill-top looking off upon the fight. It is a Garibaldi 
or a Napoleon I. who leaps into the stirrups and 
dashes ahead. And you stand outside the Christian 
life and tell your children to go in. They will not 
go. But you dash on ahead, you enter the kingdom 
of God, and they themselves will become good sol- 
diers of Jesus Christ. Lead, if you would have 
them follow. 



CHAPTER XIII. 



ANANIAS AND SAPPHIRA. 

There are thousands of ways of telling a lie. A 
man's whole life may be a falsehood, and yet never 
with his lips may he falsify once. There is a way of 
uttering falsehood by look, by manner, as well as by 
lip. There are persons who are guilty of dishonesty 
of speech and then afterward say "may be call it a 
white lie. when no lie is that color. The whitest lie 
ever told was as black as perdition. There are those 
so given to dishonesty of speech that they do not 
know when they are lying. 

With some it is an acquired sin, and with others it 
is a natural infirmity. There are those whom you 
will recognize as born liars. Their whole life, from 
cradle to grave, is filled up with vice of speech. 
Misrepresentation and prevarication are as natural 
to them as the infantile diseases, and are a sort of 
moral croup or spiritual scarlatina. Then there are 
those who in after life have opportunities of develop- 
ing this evil, and they go from deception to decep- 
tion, and from class to class, until they are regularly 
graduated liars. 

There is something in the presence of natural ob- 
jects that has a tendency to make one pure. The 
trees never issue false stock. The wheat fields are 
always honest. Rye and oats never move out in the 
night, not paying for the place they occupy. Corn 

150 



ANANIAS AND SAPPHIRA. 



shocks never make false assignment. Mountain 
brooks are always current. The gold of the wheat 
fields is never counterfeit. But while the tendency 
of agricultural life is to make one honest, honesty is 
not the characteristic of all who come to the city 
markets from the country districts. You hear the 
creaking of the dishonest farm-wagon in almost ever) 7 
street of our great cities, a farm-wagon in which 
there is not one honest spoke or one truthful rivet 
from tongue to tail-board. Again and again has do- 
mestic economy in our great cities foundered on the 
farmer's firkin. When New York, and Brooklyn, 
and Cincinnati, and Boston sit down and weep over 
their sins, Westchester and Long Island counties and 
all the country districts ought to sit down and weep 
over theirs. 

The tendency in all rural districts is to suppose 
that sins and transgressions cluster in our great cities ; 
but citizens and merchants long ago learned that it is 
not safe to calculate from the character of the apples 
on the top of the farmer's barrel what is the charac- 
ter of the apples all the way down toward the bot- 
tom. Many of our citizens and merchants have 
learned that it is always safest to see the farmer meas- 
ure the barrel of beets. Milk cans are not always 
honest. There are those who in country life seem 
to think they have a right to overreach grain-dealers, 
merchants of all styles. They think it is more hon- 
orable to raise corn than to deal in corn. 

The producer sometimes practically says to the 
merchant : "You get your money easily, anyhow." 
Does he get it easy ? While the farmer sleeps, and 
he may go to sleep conscious of the fact that his corn 
and rye are all the time progressing and adding to 



!ij2 ANANIAS AND SAPPHIRA. 

his fortune or his livelihood, the merchant tries to 
sleep while conscious of the fact that at that moment 
the ship may be driving on the rock, or a wave 
sweeping over the hurricane deck spoiling his goods, 
or the speculators may be plotting a momentary 
revolution, or the burglars may be at that moment 
at his money safe, or the fire may have kindled on 
the very block where his store stands. 

Easy is it? Let those who get their living in the 
quiet farm and barn take the place of one of our city 
merchants and see whether it is so easy. It is hard 
enough to have the hands blistered with out-door 
work, but it is harder with mental anxieties to have 
the brain consumed. God help the merchants. And 
do not let those who live in country life come to the 
conclusion that all the dishonesties belong to city 
life. There are those who apologiz-e for deviations 
from the right and for practical deception by saying 
it is commercial custom. In other words, a lie by 
multiplication becomes a virtue. 

There are large fortunes gathered in which there 
is not one drop of the sweat of unrequited toil, and 
not one spark of bad temper flashes from the bronze 
bracket, and there is not one drop of needlewoman's 
heart's blood on the crimson plush ; while there are 
other fortunes about which it may be said that on 
every door-knob and on every figure of the carpet, 
and on every wall there is the mark of dishonor. 
What if the hand wrung by toil, and blistered until 
the skin comes off should be placed on the exquisite 
wall paper, leaving its mark of blood — four fingers 
and a thumb ? or, if in the night the man should be 
aroused from his slumber again and again by his 
own conscience, getting himself up on his elbow, and 
crying out into the darkness : "Who is there?" 



ANANIAS AND SAPPHIRA. 



l 53 



There are large fortunes upon which God's favor 
comes down, and it is just as honest and just as 
Christian to be affluent as it is to be poor. In many 
a house there is a blessing on every pictured wall, 
and on every scroll, and on every traceried window, 
and the joy that flashes in the lights, and that 
showers in the music, and that dances in the quick 
feet of the children pattering through the hall, has 
in it the favor of God and the approval of man. And 
there are thousands and tens of thousands of mer- 
chants who, from the first day they sold a yard of 
cloth, or a firkin of butter, have maintained their in- 
tegrity. They were born honest, they will live hon- 
est, and they will die honest. 

But you and I know that there are in commercial 
life those who are guilty of great dishonesties of 
speech. A merchant says : "I am selling these goods 
at less than cost." Is he getting for those goods a 
price inferior to that which he paid for them ? Then 
he has spoken the truth. Is he getting more ? Then 
he lies. A merchant says: "I paid $25 for this 
article." Is that the price he paid for it? All right. 
But suppose he paid for it $23 instead of $25 ? Then 
he lies. 

But there are just as many falsehoods before the 
counter as there are behind the counter. A customer 
comes in and asks: "How much is this article?" 
"It is five dollars." "I can get that for four some- 
where else." Can he get it for four somewhere else, 
or did he say that just for the purpose of getting 
it cheap by depreciating the value of the goods ? 
If so, he lied. There are just as many falsehoods 
behind the counter as there are before the counter. 
A man unrolls upon the counter a bale of handker- 



^4 ANANIAS AND SAPPHIRA. 

chiefs. The customer says: "Are these all silk?" 
"Yes." "No cotton in them ?" "No cotton in them?" 
Are those handkerchiefs all silk? Then the mer- 
chant told the truth. Is there any cotton in them ? 
Then he lied. Moreover, he defrauds himself, for 
this customer, coming in from Hempstead, or Yon- 
kers, or Newark, will, after a while, find out that he 
has been defrauded, and the next time he comes to 
town and goes shopping, he will look up at that sign 
and say : "No, I won't go there ; that's the place 
where I got those handkerchiefs." First, the mer- 
chant insulted God, and secondly, he picked his own 
pocket. 

Who would take the responsibility of saying how 
many falsehoods were yesterday told by hardware 
men, and clothiers, and lumbermen, and tobacconists, 
and jewelers, and importers, and shippers, and dealers 
in furniture, and dealers in coal, and dealers in gro- 
ceries ? Lies about buckles, about saddles, about har- 
ness, about shoes, about hats, about coats, about 
shovels, about tongs, about forks, about chairs, about 
sofas, about horses, about lands, about everything. I 
arraign commercial falsehood as one of the crying 
sins of our time. 

Among the artisans are those upon whom we are 
dependent for the houses in which we live, the gar- 
ments we wear, the cars in which we ride. The vast 
majority of them are, so far as I know them, men 
who speak the truth, and they are upright, and many 
of them are foremost in great philanthropies and in 
churches ; but that they all do not belong to that 
class every one knows. 

In times when there is a great demand for labor, it 
is not so easy for such men to keep their obligations, 



ANANIAS AND SAPPHIRA. 



155 



because they may miscalculate in regard to the 
weather, or they may not be able to get the help 
they anticipated in their enterprise. I am speaking 
now of those who promise to do that which they 
know they will not be able to do. They say they 
will come on Monday ; they do not come until 
Wednesday. They say they will come Wednesday ; 
they do not come until Saturday. They say they 
will have the job done in ten days ; they do not get 
it done before thirty. And then when a man becomes 
irritated and will not stand it any longer, then they 
go and work for him a day or two and keep the job 
along ; and then some one else gets irritated and out- 
raged, and they go and work for that man and get 
him pacified, and then they go somewhere else. I 
believe they call that " nursing the job." 

Ah, my friends, how much dishonor such men 
would save their souls if they would promise to do 
only that which they know they can do. " Oh," 
they say, " it's of no importance ; everybody expects 
to be deceived and disappointed." There is a voice 
of thunder sounding among the saws and the ham- 
mers and the shears, saying : " All liars shall have 
their place in the lake that burns with fire and brim- 
stone." So in all styles of work there are those who 
are not worthy of their work. 

How much of society is insincere. You hardly 
know what to believe. They send their regards; 
you do not exactly know whether it is an expression 
of the heart, or an external civility. They ask you 
to come to their house ; you hardly know whether 
they really want you to come. We are all accustomed 
to take a discount off of what we hear. 

Social life is struck through with insincerity. They 



I 56 ANANIAS AND SAPPHIRA. 

apologize for the fact that the furnace is out ; they 
have not had any fire in it all winter. They apolo- 
gize for the fare on their table ; they never live any 
better. They decry their most luxuriant entertain- 
ment to win a shower of approval from you. They 
point at a picture on the wall as a work of one of the 
old masters. They say it is an heirloom in the fam- 
ily. It hung on the wall of a castle. A duke gave 
it to their grandfather ! People that will lie about 
nothing else will lie about a, picture. On small 
income we want the world to believe we are affluent, 
and society to-day is struck through with cheat and 
counterfeit and sham. How few people are natural. 

Frigidity sails around, iceberg grinding against 
iceberg. You must not laugh outright ; that is vul- 
gar. You must smile. You must not dash quickly 
across the room ; that is vulgar. You must glide. 
Society is a round of bows and grins and grimaces 
and oh's and ah's and he, he, he's, and simperings 
and namby pambyisms, a whole world of which is not 
worth one good honest round of laughter. From 
such a hollow scene the tortured guest retires at the 
close of the evening, assuring the host that he has 
enjoyed himself. Society is become so contorted 
and deformed in this respect that a mountain cabin 
where the rustics gather at a quilting or an apple- 
paring has in it more good cheer than all the frescoed 
refrigerators of the metropolis. 

It is hardly worth your while to ask an extreme 
Calvinist what an Arminian believes. He will tell 
you an Arminian believes that man can save himself. 
An Arminian believes no such thing. It is hardly 
worth your while to ask an extreme Arminian what 
a Calvinist believes. He will tell you that a Calvin- 



ANANIAS AND SAPPHIRA. 



ist believes that God made some men just to damn 
them. A Calvinist believes no such thing. 

It is hardly worth your while to ask a Pedo-Baptist 
what a Baptist believes. He will tell you a Baptist 
believes that immersion is necessary for salvation. A 
Baptist does not believe any such thing. It is hardly 
worth your while to ask a man, who very much hates 
Presbyterians, what a Presbyterian believes. He 
will tell you that a Presbyterian believes that there 
are infants in hell a span long, and that very phra- 
seology has come down from generation to genera- 
tion in the Christian Church. There never was a 
Presbyterian who believed that. " Oh," you say, " I 
heard some Presbyterian minister twenty years ago 
say so." You did not. There never was a man who 
believed that, there never will be a man who will 
believe that. And yet from boyhood I have heard 
that particular slander against a Christian Church 
going down through the community. 

Then how often it is that there are misrepresenta- 
tions on the part of individual churches in regard to 
other churches — especially if a church comes to great 
prosperity. As long as a church is in poverty, and 
the singing is poor and all the surroundings are de- 
crepit, and the congregation are so hardly bestead in 
life that their pastor goes with elbows out, then there 
will always be Christian people in churches who say, 
" What a pity, what a pity ! " But let the day of 
prosperity come to a Christian Church, and let the 
music be triumphant, and let there be vast assem- 
blages, and then there will be even ministers of the 
Gospel critical and denunciatory and full of misrep- 
resentation and falsification, giving the impression 
to the outside world that they do not like the corn 



158 ANANIAS AND SAPPHIRA. 

because it is not ground in their mill. Oh, my 
friends, let us in all departments of life stand back 
from deception. 

" Oh," says some one, " the deception that I prac- 
tice is so small it don't amount to anything." Ah, 
my friends, it does amount to a great deal. You say: 
" When I deceive it is only about a case of needles, 
or a box of buttons, or a row of pins." But the arti- 
cle may be so small you can put it in your vest 
pocket, but the sin is as big as the pyramids, and the 
echo of your dishonor will reverberate through the 
mountains of eternity. There is no such thing as a 
small sin. They are all vast and stupendous, because 
they will all have to come under inspection in the 
Day of Judgment. 



CHAPTER XIV. 



THE BALANCE-SHEET. 

The impression is abroad that religion puts a man 
on short allowance ; that when the ship sailing 
heavenward comes to the shining wharf it will be 
found out that all the passengers had the hardest 
kind of sea-fare; that the soldiers in Christ's army 
march most of the time with an empty haversack ; in 
a word, that only those people have a good time in 
this world who take upon themselves no religious 
obligation. 

I want to find out whether this is so, and I am go- 
ing to take stock ; I am going to show what are the 
Christian's liabilities, and what is his income, and 
what are his warranty deeds, and what are his bonds 
and mortgages. 

Now, it would be an absurd thing to suppose that 
God would give to strangers privileges and advant- 
ages which He would deny His own children. If 
you have a large park, a grand mansion, beautiful 
fountains, stalking deer, and statuary, to whom will 
you give the first right to all these possessions ? To 
outsiders ? No, to your own children. You will 
say : "It will be very well for outsiders to come in, 
and walk these paths, and enjoy this landscape ; but 
the first right to my house, and the first right to my 
statuary, the first right to my gardens, shall be in the 
possession, of my own children." 

159 



i6o 



THE BALANCE-SHEET. 



Now, this world is God's park, and while He 
allows those who are not His children, and who re- 
fuse His authority, the privilege of walking through 
the gardens, the possession of all this grandeur of 
park and mansion is in the right of the Christian — 
the flowers, the diamonds, the silver, the gold, the 
morning brightness, and the evening shadow. The 
Christian may not have the title-deed to one acre of 
land, as recorded in the clerk's office, he may never 
have paid one dollar of taxes ; but he can go up on a 
mountain, and look off upon fifty miles of grain-field, 
and say, "All this is mine ; my Father gave it to me." 

So the refinements of life are the Christian's right. 
He has a right to as good apparel, to as beautiful 
adornments, to as commodious a residence as the 
worldling. Show me any passage in the Bible that 
tells the people of the world they have privileges, 
they have glittering spheres, they have befitting ap- 
parel, that are denied the Christian. There is no one 
who has so much a right to laugh, none so much a 
right to everything that is beautiful, and grand, and 
sublime in life, as the Christian. "All are yours." 
Can it be possible that one who is reckless and sinful, 
and has no treasures laid up in heaven, is to be 
allowed pleasures which the sons and daughters of 
God, the owners of the whole universe, are denied ? 

So all the sweet sounds of the world are in the 
Christian's right. There are people who have an 
idea that instruments of music are inappropriate for 
the Christian's parlor, or for the Christian Church. 
When did the house of sin, or the bacchanal, get the 
right to music ? 

They have no right to it. God makes over to 
Christian people all the pianos, all the harps, all the 



THE BALANCE-SHEET. 



161 



drums, all the cornets, all the flutes, all the organs. 
People of the world may borrow them, but they only 
borrow them ; they have no right or title to them. 
God gave them to Christian people when He said : 
"All are yours." 

David no more certainly owned the harp with 
which he thrummed the praises of God, than the 
Church of Christ owns now all chants, all anthems, 
all ivory key-boards, all organ diapasons, and God 
will gather up these sweet sounds after a while, and 
He will mingle these in one great harmony, and the 
Mendelssohns, and the Beethovens, and the Mozarts 
of the earth will join their voices, and their musical 
instruments, and soft south wind and loud-lunged 
euroclydon will sweep the great organ pipes, and 
you shall see God's hand striking the keys, and God's 
foot tramping the pedals in the great oratorio of 
the ages ! 

So all the vicissitudes of this life, so far as they 
have any religious profit, are in the right of the 
Christian. You stand among the Alleghany Moun- 
tains, especially near what is called the " Horseshoe," 
and you will find a train of cars almost doubling on 
itself, and sitting in the back car you see a locomotive 
coming as you look out of the window, and you 
think it is another train, when it is only the front of 
the train in which you are riding ; and sometimes 
you can hardly tell whether the train is going toward 
Pittsburgh or toward Philadelphia, but it is on the 
track, and it will reach the depot for which it started, 
and all the passengers will be discharged at the right 
place. Now, there are a great many sharp curves in 
life. Sometimes we seem to be going this way, and 
sometimes we seem to be going that way ; but, if we 



1 62 THE BALANCE-SHEET. 

are Christians, we are on the right track, and we are 
going to come out at the right place. Do not get 
worried, then, about the sharp curve. 

A sailing vessel starts from New York to Glasgow. 
Does it go in a straight line ? Oh, no. It changes its 
tack every little while. Now, you say, " This vessel, 
instead of going to Glasgow, must be going to Havre, 
or it is going to Hamburg, or it is going to Mar- 
seilles." No, no. It is going to Glasgow. And in 
this voyage of life we often have to change our 
tacks. One storm blows us this way, and another 
storm blows us that way ; but He who holds the 
winds in His fist will bring us into a haven of ever- 
lasting rest just at the right time. Do not worry, 
then, if you have to change tacks. 

One of the best things that ever happened to Paul 
was being thrown off his horse. One of the best 
things that ever happened to Joseph was being 
thrown into the pit. The losing of his physical eye- 
sight helped John Milton to see the battle of the 
angels. One of the best things that ever happened to 
Ignatius was being thrown to the wild beasts in the 
the Coliseum, and while eighty thousand people were 
jeering at his religion, he walked up to the fiercest of 
all the lions, and looked him in the eye, as much as to 
say, " Here I am, ready to be devoured for Christ's 
sake." 

All things work together for your good. If you 
walk the desert, the manna will fall, and the sea will 
part. If the feverish torch of sickness is kindled over 
your pillow, by its light you can read the promise. 
If the waves of trouble dash clear high above your 
girdle, across the blast and across the surge you can 
hear the promise, " When thou passest through the 



THE BALANCE-SHEET. 



163 



waters, I will be with thee." You never owned a 
glove, or a shoe, or a hat, or a coat, more certainly 
than you own all the frets, and annoyances, and exas- 
perations of this life, and they are bound to work out 
your present and your eternal good. They are the 
saws, the hammers, the files, by which you are to be 
hewn, and cut, and smoothed for your eternal well- 
being. 

I go further, and tell you that the Christian owns, 
not only this world, but he owns the next world. 

No chasm to be leaped, no desert to be crossed. 
There is the wall ; there is the gate of heaven. He 
owns all on this side. Now, I am going to show you 
that he owns all on the other side. Death is not a 
ruffian that comes to burn us out of house and home, 
destroying the house of the tabernacle so that we 
should be homeless forever. Oh, no ! He is only a 
black messenger who comes to tell us it is time to 
move ; to tell us to get out of this hut, and go up into 
the palace. The Christian owns all heaven. " All are 
yours." Its palaces of beauty, its towers of strength, 
castles of love. He will not walk in the eternal city 
as a foreigner in a strange city, but as a farmer walks 
over his own premises, "All are yours." All the 
mansions yours. Angels your companions. Trees 
of life your shade. Hills of glory your lookout. 
Thrones of heaven the place where you will shout 
the triumph. Jesus is yours. God is yours. 

You look up into the face of God, and say, " My 
Father." You look up into the face of Jesus, and 
say, " My Brother." Walk out on the battlements of 
heaven, and look off upon the city of the sun. 

No tears. No sorrow. No death. No smoke of 
toiling warehouse curling on the air. No voice of 



164 THE BALANCE-SHEET. 

blasphemy thrilling through the bright, clear Sab- 
bath morning. No din of strife jarring the air. Then 
take out your deed, and remember that from throne 
to throne, and from wall to wall, and from horizon to 
horizon, " all are yours." 

Then go up into the temple of the sun, worshipers 
in white, each with a palm branch, and from high 
gallery of that temple look down upon the thousands 
of thousands, and the ten thousand times ten thou- 
sand, and the one hundred and forty and four thou- 
sand, and .the great " multitude that no man can 
number," and louder than the rush of the wheels, 
louder than the tramp of the redeemed, hear a voice 
saying, "All are yours." See the great procession 
marching around the throne of God. Martyrs who 
went up on wings of flame. Invalids who went up 
from couches of distress. Toilers who went up from 
the workhouse, and the factory, and the mine. All 
the suffering and the bruised children of God. See 
the chariots of salvation ; in them those who were 
more than conquerors. See them marching around 
about the throne of God forever and forever, and 
know that "all are yours." 

O ye who have pains of body, that exhaust your 
strength and wear out your patience, I hold before 
you this morning the land of eternal health, and of 
imperishable beauty. O ye, who have hard work to 
get your daily bread, hard work to shelter.your chil- 
dren from the storm, I lift before you the vision of 
that land where they never hunger, and they never 
thirst, and God feeds them, and robes cover them, 
and the warmth of eternal love fills them, and all that 
is yours. O ye whose hearts are buried in the grave 
of your dead — O ye whose happiness went by long 



THE BALANCE-SHEET. 



I6 5 



ago — O ye who mourn for countenances that never 
will light up, and for eyes closed forever — sit no 
longer among the tombs, but look here. A home 
that shall never be broken up. Green fields never 
cleft of the grave. Ransomed ones, from you parted 
long ago, now radiant with a joy that shall never 
cease, and a love that shall never grow cold, and 
wearing garments that shall never wither, and know 
all that is yours. Yours the love. Yours the ac- 
claim. Yours the transport. Yours the cry of the 
four and twenty elders. Yours the choiring of cher- 
ubim. Yours the lamb that was slain. 

In the vision of that glorious consummation I 
almost lose my foothold, and have to hold fast lest I 
be overborne by the glory. The vision rose before 
St. John on Patmos, and he saw Christ in a blood-red 
garment, riding on a white horse, and all heaven fol- 
lowing Him on white horses. What a procession ! 
Let Jesus ride. He walked the way footsore, weary, 
and faint. Now let Him ride. White horse of vic- 
tory, bear on our Chief. Hosanna to the son of 
David ! Ride on, Jesus ! Let all heaven follow Him. 
These cavalry of God fought well, and they fought 
triumphantly. Now let them be mounted. The 
pavements of gold ring under the flying hoofs. 
Swords sheathed and victories won, like conquerors 
they sit on their chargers. Ye mounted troops of 
God, ride on ! ride on ! ten thousand abreast, caval- 
cade after cavalcade. No blood dashed to the lips. 
No blood dripping from the fetlocks. No smoke of 
battle breathed from the nostril. The battle is 
ended — the victory won ! 



CHAPTER XV. 



NOONTIDE OF LIFE. 

It seems to me that in some respects the hill-top in 
the journey of life is the best part of the journey. 

While in early life we are climbing up the steep 
hillside, we have worries and frets, and we slip, and 
we fall, and we slide back, and we run upon sharp 
antagonisms, and all the professions and occupations 
have drudgeries and sharp rivalries at the start. We 
are afraid we will not be properly appreciated. We 
toil on, and we pant, and we struggle, and we are out 
of breath, and sometimes we are tempted to lie 
down in the bower of lazy indulgence. In addition 
to these difficulties of climbing the hill of life, there 
are those who rejoice in setting a man back and try- 
ing to make a young man cowed down. 

Every young man has had somebody to meet him 
as he was climbing up, and say to him : " Don't, don't 
— you can't, you can't — quit, quit!" Everv young 
man has had twenty disheartenments where he has 
one round word of good cheer. But after we have 
climbed to the top of the hill of life, then we have 
comparative tranquility and repose. We begin to 
look about us. We find that it is just three miles 
from cradle to grave: Youth the first mile, man- 
hood the second mile, old age the third mile. Stand- 
ing on the hill-top of the journey of life and in the 
second mile, having come up one side the hill, and 

1 66 



NOONTIDE OF LIFE. 



before I go down the other side, I want to tell you 
that life is to me a happiness, and much of the time 
it has been to me a rapture, and sometimes an 
ecstasy. 

There has been a great deal of wholesale slander 
of this world. People abuse it, and the traveler on 
the mountain curses the chill, and the voyager on the 
deep curses the restlessness, and there are those who 
say it is a mean, old, despicable world, and from pole 
to pole it has been calumniated ; and if the world 
should present a libel suit for all those who have 
slandered it, there would not be gold enough in the 
mountains to pay the damages, or places enough in 
the penitentiaries to hold the offenders. The people 
not only slander the world, but they slander its 
neighbors, and they belabor the sun, now because it 
is too ardent, and now because it is too distant ; but 
by experience coming up the hill of life I have found 
out when there is anything wrong the trouble is not 
with the sun, or the moon, or the stars, or the 
meteorological conditions ; the trouble is with my- 
self. Oh, I am so glad that while this world as a 
finality is a dead failure, as a hotel where we stop for 
awhile in our traveling on toward a better place, it 
is a very good world, a very kind world, and I am 
glad that the shepherd in so pleasant a place makes 
his flocks rest at noon ! 

But having told you how life seems to me on the 
hill-top of the journey, you naturally want to know 
how it seems to me when I look backward, and when 
I look forward. The first thing a traveler does after 
climbing up to the top of a mountain is to take a long 
breath, and then look about and see what is all around 
him. He sees out in this direction the winding road 



i68 



NOONTIDE OF LIFE. 



up which he came, and out in that direction the wind- 
ing road down which he shall go. And so, standing 
on the hill-top of life's journey, I put my outspread 
hand to my forehead, so as to keep off the glare of 
the noonday's sun, and to concentre my vision, and 
I look back on the winding road on which I have 
traveled, and I see far on down at the foot of that 
road, in the dim distance, something small, something 
insignificant, and it vibrates, and it trembles, and it 
rocks. I wonder what it is. I guess what it is. A 
cradle ! 

Then I turn, and still keeping my outspread hand 
to my forehead so as to shade my eyes from the glare 
of the noonda}r's sun, and to concentrate my vision, I 
look on the winding road down which I shall travel, 
and I see at the foot of the road something that does 
not tremble, does not vibrate, does not rock — some- 
thing white — and then near it a bank of the earth, 
and I wonder what it is. Ah ! I see what it is. I 
guess what it is. I know what it is. A grave. 

So, standing on the hill-top, having come up one 
side the hill, and before I go down the other side, 
you ask me two or three questions, and I tell you that 
I have learned in coming up this side of life, the steep 
side, the first side — I have learned that nothing is ac- 
complished without hard work. And I say to the 
multitude of young people starting in occupations 
and professions, nothing is accomplished without 
work, hard work, continuous work, all-absorbing 
work, everlasting work. 

A parishioner asked a clergyman why the congre- 
gation had filled up, and why the church was now so 
prosperous above what it had ever been before. 
"Well," said the clergyman, "I will tell you the 



NOONTIDE OF LIFE. 169 

secret. I met a tragedian some time ago, and I said 
to him, ' How is it you get along so well in your pro- 
fession ? ' The tragedian replied, ' The secret is, I 
always do my best ; when stormy days come, and the 
theatre is not more than half or a fourth occupied, I 
always do my best, and that has been the secret of 
my getting on.' " And the clergyman reciting it, 
said : " I have remembered that, and ever since then 
I have always done my best." And I say to you, in 
whatever occupation or profession God has put you, 
Do your best ; whether the world appreciates it or 
not, do your best — always do your best. Domitian, 
the Roman emperor, for one hour every day caught 
flies and killed them with his penknife ; and there are 
people with imperial opportunity who set themselves 
to some insignificant business. Oh, for something 
grand to do, and then concentrate all your energies of 
body, mind, and soul upon that one thing, and noth- 
ing in earth or hell can stand before you. There is 
110 such thing as good luck. 

I have learned also in coming up this steep hill of 
life, that all events are connected. I look back and 
now see events which I thought were isolated and 
alone, but I find now they were adjoined to every- 
thing that went before, and everything that came 
after. The chain of life is made up of a great many 
links — large links, small links, silver links, iron links, 
beautiful links, ugly links, mirthful links, solemn links 
— but they are all parts of one great chain of destiny. 
Each minute is made up of sixty links, and each day 
is made up of twenty-four links, and each year is 
made of three hundred and sixty-five links ; but they 
are all parts of one endless chain which plays and 
works through the hand of an all-governing God. 



I JO NOONTIDE OF LIFE. 

No event stands alone. Sometimes you say, " This 
is my day off." You will never have a day off. 
Nothing is off. 

But if you continue to ask me how the past seems, 
I answer it seems like three or four picture galleries — 
Dusseldorf, Louvre, and Luxembourg — their corri- 
dors interjoining. I close my eyes and see them 
coasting the hillside, and flying the kite, and trund- 
ling the hoop, and gathering nuts in the autumnal 
forests, and then a little while after, bending in 
anxious study over the lexicons and the trigonom- 
etries. Where are those comrades? Most of them 
gone. Some are in useful spheres on earth. Some 
died in rapture, and a good many of them perished 
in dissipation before thirty years of age. The wine- 
cup, with its sharp edge, cut the jugular vein of their 
soul. Poor fellows ! They tried the world without 
God, and the world was too much for them. Splen- 
did fellows ! Oh, what forehead they had for brain, 
and what muscle they had for strength, and what 
gleam of eye they had for genius, and what loving 
letters they got from home, and how they carried off 
the bouquets on Commencement Day ! But they 
made the terrific mistake of thinking religion a super- 
fluity, and now they are in my memory, not so much 
canvas as sculpture — some Laocoon struggling with 
snapped muscles, and eyes starting from the socket 
for torture ; struggling amid the crushing folds of a 
serpentine monstrosity, a reptile horror, a Laocoon 
worse than that of the ancients. 

Satan has a fastidious appetite, and the vulgar 
souls he throws into a trough to fatten his swine ; 
but he says: "Bring to my golden plate all the fine 
natures, bring to my golden plate all the clear intel- 



NOONTIDE OF LIFE. 



lects, bring them to me ; my knife will cut down 
through the lusciousness ; fill my chalice with the 
richest of their blood ; pour it in until it comes three- 
fourths full ; pour it in until it comes to the rim of 
the chalice ; pour it until the blood bubbles over the 
rim. There, that will do now. Oh, this infernal 
banquet of great souls ! Aha ! aha ! let the common 
demons have the vulgar souls, but give to me, who 
am the king of all diabolism, the jolliest, the gladdest, 
and the grandest of all this immortal sacrifice. Aha!" 

Then in my mind there is the home gallery. 

Oh, those dear faces, old faces and }^oung faces, 
faces that have lost nothing of their loveliness by the 
recession of years, faces into which we looked when 
we sat on their laps, faces that looked up to us when 
they sat on our laps, faces that wept, faces that 
laughed, faces wrinkled with old age, faces all aflush 
with juvenile jocundity, faces that have disappeared, 
faces gone. 

But you ask how the rest of the journey appears 
to me. As I look down now, having come up one 
side, and standing on the hill-top, and before I take 
the other journey, let me say to you, the road yet to 
be traveled, seems to me brighter than the one on 
which I have journeyed. I would not want to live 
life over again, as some wish to. If we lived life 
over again we would do no better than we have 
done. Our lives have been lived over five hundred 
times before. We saw five, hundred people make 
mistakes in life, and we went right on and made the 
same mistakes. Our life was not the first. There 
were five hundred or a thousand people living before 
us. We did not profit by their example. We went 
right on and broke down in the same place, and if 



1/2 NOONTIDE OF LIFE. 

we did not do any better with those experiences be- 
fore us, do you think we would do any better if we 
tried life over again ? No. I should rather go right 
on. If we tried life over again we would repeat the 
same journey. 

"But," says some one, "don't you know there may 
be trials, hardships, sicknesses, and severe duties 
ahead?" ' Oh, yes! But if I am on a railroad jour- 
ney of a thousand miles, and I have gone five hun- 
dred of the miles, and during those five hundred miles 
I have found the bridges safe, and the track solid, 
and the conductors competent, and the engineer 
wide awake, does not that give me confidence for 
the other five hundred miles ? God has seen me 
through up to this time, and I am going to trust Him 
for the rest of the journey. I believe I have a 
through ticket, and although sometimes the track 
may turn this way or the other way, and sometimes 
we may be plunged through tunnels, and sometimes 
we may have a hot box that detains the train, and 
sometimes we may switch off upon a side track to let 
somebody else pass, and sometimes we may see a red 
flag warning us to slow up, I believe we are going 
through to the right place. 

I have not a fear, an anxiety, that I can mention. I 
do not know one. I put all my case in God's hands, 
and I have not any anxiety about the future. I do 
not feel foolhardy. I only trust. I trust, I trust, I 
trust ! And — for there are those here of my own 
age— let me say, when we come to duties, and trials, 
and hardships, God is going to see us through. 

From this hill-top of life I catch a glimpse of those 
hill-tops where all sorrow and sighing shall be done 
away. Oh, that God would make that world to us a 



NOONTIDE OF LIFE. 



173 



reality ! Faith in that world helped old Dr. Tyng, 
when he stood by the casket of his dead son, whose 
arm had been torn off in the threshing-machine, death 
ensuing ; and Dr. Tyng, with infinite composure, 
preached "the funeral sermon of his own beloved son. 
Faith in that world helped Martin Luther, without 
one tear, to put away in- death his favorite child. 
Faith in that world helped the dying woman to see 
on the sky the letter "W," and they asked her what 
she supposed the letter " W " on the sky meant. 
"Oh," she said, "don't you know ? W stands for 
welcome." O Heaven, swing open thy gates! O 
Heaven, roll upon us some of thine anthems ! O 
Heaven, flash upon us the vision of thy luster ! 



« 



CHAPTER XVI. 

A SCROLL OF HEROES. 

Historians are not slow to acknowledge the merits 
of great military chieftains. We have the full-length 
portraits of the Baldwins, the Cromwells, and the 
Marshal Neys of the world. History is not written 
in black ink, but with red ink of human blood. The 
gods of human ambition did not drink from bowls 
made out of silver, or gold, or precious stones, but 
out of the bleached skulls of the fallen. But I am to 
unroll before you a scroll of heroes that the world 
has never acknowledged ; they who faced no guns, 
blew no bugle blast, conquered no cities, chained no 
captives to their chariot wheels, and yet, in the great 
day of eternity will stand higher than those whose 
names startled the nations; and seraph and rapt 
spirit and archangel will tell their deeds to a listening 
universe. I mean the heroes of common, everyday 
life. 

In this roll, in the first place, I find all the heroes 
of the sick room. 

When Satan had failed to overcome Job he said to 
God : " Put forth thy hand and touch his bone and 
his flesh, and he will curse Thee to Thy face." Satan 
had found out what we have all found out, that sick- 
ness is the greatest test of character. A man who 
can stand that can stand anything ; to be shut in a 
room as fast as though it were a Bastile ; to be so 

174 



A SCROLL OF HEROES. 



175 



nervous you cannot endure the tap of a child's foot; 
to have luxuriant fruit, which tempts the appetite of 
the robust and healthy, excite our loathing and dis- 
gust when it first appears on the platter; to have the 
rapier of pain strike through the side or across the 
temples like a razor, or to put the foot into a vise, or 
to throw the whole fcody into the blaze of a fever. 
Yet there have been men and women, but more 
women than men, who have cheerfully endured this 
hardness. Through years of exhausting rheumatisms 
and excruciating neuralgias they have gone, and 
through bodily distresses that rasped the nerves, and 
tore the muscles, and paled the cheeks, and stooped 
the shoulders. By the dim light of the sick room 
taper they saw on their wall the picture of that land 
where the people are never sick. Through the dead 
silence of the night they have heard the chorus of 
the angels. 

Those who suffered on the battlefield, amid shot and 
shell, were not so much heroes and heroines as those 
who in the field hospital and in the asylum had 
fevers which no ice could cool and no surgeon could 
cure. No shout of comrade to cheer them, but 
numbness and aching and homesickness — yet willing 
to suffer, confident in God, hopeful of heaven. 
Heroes of rheumatism, heroes of neuralgia, heroes of 
spinal complaint, heroes of sick headache, heroes of 
life-long invalidism, heroes and heroines, they shall 
reign forever and forever. Hark ! 1 catch just one 
note of the eternal anthem : " There shall be no more 
pain." Bless God for that. 

In this roll I also find the heroes of toil, who do 
their work uncomplainingly. It is comparatively 
easy to lead a regiment into battle when you know 



i;6 A SCROLL OF HEROES. 

that the whole nation will applaud the victory ; it is 
comparatively easy to doctor the sick when you 
know that your skill will be appreciated by a large 
company of friends and relatives; it is comparatively 
easy to address an audience when in the gleaming 
eyes and the flushed cheeks you know that your sen- 
timents are adopted ; but to cto sewing where you 
expect that the employer will come and thrust his 
thumb through the work to show how imperfect it 
is, or to have the whole garment thrown back on you, 
to be done over again ; to build a wall and know 
there will be no one to say you did it well, but only 
a swearing employer howling across the scaffold ; to 
work until your eyes are dim, and your back aches, 
and your heart faints, and to know that if you stop 
before night your children will starve — that is 
heroism. 

Ah, the sword has not slain so many as the needle I 
The great battlefields of our last war were not 
Gettysburg and Shiloh and South Mountain. The 
great battlefields of the last war were in the arsenals^ 
and the shops and the attics, where women made 
army jackets for a sixpence. They toiled on until 
they died. They had no funeral eulogium, but in 
the name of my God this morning I enroll their 
names among those of whom the world was not 
worthy ; — heroes of the needle, heroes of the sewing- 
machine, heroes of the attic, heroes of the cellar, 
heroes and heroines. 

In this roll I also find the heroes who have uncom- 
plainingly endured domestic injustices. There are 
men who for their toil and anxiety have no sympathy 
in their homes. Exhausting application to business 
gets them a livelihood, but an unfrugal wife scatters it* 



A SCROLL OF HEROES. 



177 



The husband is fretted at from the moment he enters 
the door until he comes out of it — the exasperations 
of business life augmented by the exasperations of 
domestic life. Such men are laughed at, but they 
have a heart-breaking trouble, and they would have 
long ago gone into appalling dissipations but for the 
grace of God. Society to-day is strewn with the 
wrecks of men who under the northeast storm of 
domestic infelicity have been driven on the rocks. 
There are tens of thousands of drunkards in this 
country to-day made such by their wives. That is 
not poetry ; that is prose ! 

But the wrong is generally in the opposite direc- 
tion. You wDuld not have to go far to find a wife 
whose life is a perpetual martyrdom — something 
heavier than a stroke of the fist, unkind words, stag- 
gerings home at midnight, and constant maltreatment, 
which have left her only a wreck of what she was on 
that day when, in the midst of a brilliant assemblage, 
the vows were taken and full organ played the 
wedding march, and the carriage rolled away with 
the benediction of the people. 

What was the burning of Latimer and Ridley at 
the stake compared with this? Those men soon 
became unconscious in the fire, but here is a fifty 
years' martyrdom, a fifty years' putting to death, yet 
uncomplaining. No bitter words when rollicking 
companions at two o'clock in the morning pitch the 
husband dead drunk on the stoop ; no bitter words 
when, wiping from the swollen brow the blood struck 
out in a midnight carousal," or bending over the bat- 
tered and bruised form of him who, when he took 
her from her father's home, promised love and kind- 
ness and protection ; nothing but sympathy, and 



178 A SCROLL OF HEROES. 

prayers, and forgiveness before it is asked for. No 
bitter words when the family Bible goes for rum, and 
the pawnbroker's shop gets the last decent dress. 

Some day, desiring to evoke the story of her sor- 
row, you say : " Well, how are you getting along 
now ? " And rallying her trembling voice, and quiet- 
ing her quivering lip, she says : " Pretty well, I thank 
you ; pretty well." She never will tell you. In the 
delirium of her last sickness she may tell all the 
secrets of her lifetime, but she will not tell that. Not 
until the books of eternity are opened on the thrones 
of judgment will ever be known what she has suf- 
fered. Oh, ye who are twisting a garland for the 
victor ! put it on that pale brow. 

When she is dead the neighbors will beg linen to 
make her a shroud, and she will be carried out in a 
plain box, with no silver plate to tell her years, for 
she has lived a thousand years of trial and anguish. 
The gamblers and the swindlers who destroyed her 
husband, will not come to the funeral. One carriage 
will be enough for that funeral — one carriage to carry 
the orphans and the two Christian women who pre- 
sided over the obsequies. But there is a flash, and a 
clank of a celestial door, and a shout, " Lift up your 
head, ye everlasting gates, and let her come in." 
And Christ will step forth, and say, " Come in ! ye 
suffered with Me on earth, be glorified with Me in 
heaven." What is the highest throne in heaven? 
You say, " The throne of the Lord God Almighty 
and the Lamb." No doubt about it. What is the 
next highest throne in heaven? While I speak it 
seems to me that it will be the throne of the drunk- 
ard's wife, if she, with cheerful patience, endured all 
her earthly torture. Heroes and heroines. 



A SCROLL OF HEROES. 



179 



I find also in this roll the heroes of Christian charity. 
We all admire the George Peabodys and the James 
Lenoxes of the earth, who give tens and hundreds of 
thousands of dollars to good objects. When Moses 
H. Grinnell was buried, the most significant thing 
about the ceremonies was that there was no sermon 
and no oration ; a plain hymn, a prayer, and a bene- 
diction. "Well," I said, "that is very beautiful." 
All Christendom pronounces the eulogium of Moses 
H. Grinnell, and the icebergs that stand as monu- 
ments to Franklin and his men, will stand as the 
monument of this great merchant, and the sunlight 
that plays upon the glittering cliff will write his 
epitaph. 

But I am speaking of those who, out of their 
pinched poverty, help others — of such men as those 
Christian missionaries at the West, who are living on 
two hundred and fifty dollars a year, that they may 
proclaim Christ to the people, one of them writing to 
the secretary in New York, saying, " I thank you for 
that twenty-five dollars. Until yesterday we have 
had no meat in our house for three months. We 
have suffered terribly. My children have no shoes 
this winter." And of those people who have only 
a half loaf of bread, but give a piece of it to others 
who are more hungry ; and of those who have only a 
scuttle of coal, but help others to fuel ; and of those 
who have only a dollar in their pocket, and give 
twenty-five cents to somebody else ; and of that 
father who wears a shabby coat, and of that mother 
who wears a faded dress, that their children may be 
well appareled. 

You call them paupers, or ragamuffins, or tatterde- 
malions. I call them heroes and heroines. You and 



i8o 



A SCROLL OF HEROES. 



* I may not know where they live, or what their name 
is. God knows ; and they have more angels hovering 
over them than you and I have, and they will have a 
higher seat in heaven. They may have only a cup of 
cold water to give a poor traveler, or may have only 
picked a splinter from under the nail of a child's 
finger, or have put only two mites into the treasury, 
but the Lord knows them. Considering what they 
had, they did more than we have ever done, and 
their faded dress will become a white robe, and the 
small room will be an eternal mansion, and the old 
hat will be a coronet of victory, and all the ap- 
plause of earth and all the shouting of heaven will be 
drowned out when God rises up to give His reward 
to those humble workers in His kingdom, and to say 
to them, " Well done, good and faithful servants." 

You have all seen or heard of the ruin of Melrose 
Abbey. I suppose in some respects it is the most 
exquisite ruin on earth. And yet, looking at it, I was 
not so impressed — you may set it down to bad taste 
— but I was not so deeply stirred as I was at a tomb- 
stone at the foot of that abbey — the tombstone planted 
by Walter Scott over the grave of an old man who 
had served him for a good many years in his house — 
the inscription most significant, and I defy any man 
to stand there and read it without tears coming into 
his eyes— the epitaph, " Well done, good and faithful 
servant." Oh, when our work is over, will it be 
found that because ol anything we have done for 
God, or the Church, or suffering humanity, that such 
an inscription is appropriate for us ? God grant it ! 

Do not envy any man his money, or his applause, 
or his social position. Do not envy any woman her 
wardrobe, or her exquisite appearance. Be the hero 



A SCROLL OF HEROES. 



181 



or the heroine. If there be no flour in the house, and 
you do not know where your children are to get 
bread, listen, and you will hear something tapping 
against the window-pane. Go to the window, and 
you will find it is the beak of a raven ; and open the 
window, and there will fly in the messenger that fed 
Elijah. 

Do you think that the God who grows the cotton 
of the South will let you freeze for lack of clothes ? 
Do you think that the God who allowed the disciples 
on Sunday morning to go into the grainfield, and 
then take the grain, and rub it in their hands, and eat 
— do you think God will let you starve ? Did you 
ever hear the experience of that old man : " I have 
been young, and now am old ; yet have I not seen the 
righteous forsaken, or his seed begging bread ? " 
Get up out of your discouragement, O troubled soul, 
O sewing woman, O man kicked and cuffed by un- 
just employers, O ye who are hard bestead in the 
battle of life and know not which way to turn, O you 
bereft one, O you sick one with complaints you have 
told to no one ! Come and get the comfort of this 
subject. Listen to our great Captain's cheer : " To 
him that overcometh, will I give to eat of the fruit of 
the tree of life which is in the midst of the paradise 
of God." 



CHAPTER XVII. 



BURDENS LIFTED. 

In the far East, wells of water are so infrequent 
that when a man owns a well he has a property of 
very great value, and sometimes battles have been 
fought for the possession of one well of water ; but 
there is one well that every man owns, a deep well, 
a perennial well, a well of tears. If a man has not a 
burden on this shoulder, he has a burden on the 
other shoulder. 

The day I left home to look after myself and for 
myself, in the wagon my father sat driving, and he 
said that day something which has kept with me all 
my life: "De Witt, it is always safe to trust God. 
I have many a time come to a crisis of difficulty. 
You may know that, having been sick for fifteen 
years, it was no easy thing for me to support a fam- 
ily ; but always God came to the rescue. I remem- 
ber the time," he said, "when I didn't know what to 
do, and I saw a man on horseback riding up the farm 
lane, and he announced to me that I had been nomi- 
nated for the most lucrative office in all the gift of the 
people of the county ; and to that office I was elected, 
.and God in that way met all my wants, and I tell 
you it is always safe to trust Him." 

Oh, my friends, what we want is a practical 
religion ! The religion people have is so high up 
you can not reach it. 

182 



BURDENS LIFTED. 



I8 3 



There are a great many men who have business 
burdens. When we see a man harried, and per- 
plexed, and annoyed in business life, we are apt to 
say: "He ought not to have attempted to carry so 
much." Ah ! that man may not be to blame at all. 
When a man plants a business he does not know 
what will be its outgrowths, what will be its roots, 
what will be its branches. There is many a man 
with keen foresight and large business faculty who 
has been flung into the dust by unforeseen circum- 
stances springing upon him from ambush. When to 
buy, when to sell, when to trust, and to what amount 
of credit, what will be the effect of this new inven- 
tion of machinery, what will be the effect of that loss 
of crop, and a thousand other questions perplex busi- 
ness men until the hair is silvered and deep wrinkles 
are plowed in the cheek ; and the stocks go up by 
mountains and go down by valleys, and they are at 
their wits' ends, and stagger like drunken men. 

This is a world of burden-bearing. Where is the 
soul that has not a struggle? There is never an 
audience assembles on the planet where the text is 
not gloriously appropriate : "Cast thy burden upon 
the Lord, and He shall sustain thee." 

You hear that it is avarice which drives these men 
of business through the street, and that is the com- 
monly accepted idea. I do not believe a word of it. 
The vast multitude of these business men are toiling 
on for others. To educate their children, to put 
wing of protection over their households, to have 
something left so when they pass out of this life their 
wives and children will not have to go to the poor- 
house — that is the way I translate this energy in the 
street and store — the vast majority of that energy. 



1 84 BURDENS LIFTED. 

Grip, Gouge & Co., do not do all the business. Some 
of us remember when the Central America was com- 
ing- home from California it was wrecked. President 
Arthur's father-in-law was the heroic captain of that 
ship, and went down with most of the passengers. 
Some of them got off into the life-boats, but there 
was a voung- man returning from California who had 
a bag of gold in his hand ; and as the last boat shoved 
off from the ship that was to go down, that young 
man shouted to a comrade in the boat: ''Here, John, 
catch this gold ; there are three thousand dollars ; 
take it home to my old mother, it will make her 
comfortable in her last days." Grip, Gouge & Co. 
do not do all the business of the world. 

Ah ! my friend, do you say that God does not care 
anything about your worldly business? I tell you 
God knows more about it than you do. He knows 
all your perplexities ; He knows what mortgagee is 
about to foreclose; He knows what note you can- 
not pay ; He knows what unsalable goods you have 
on your shelves ; He knows all your trials, from the 
day you took hold of the first yard stick down to that 
sale of the last yard of ribbon, and the God who 
helped David to be king, and who helped Daniel to 
be prime minister, and who helped Havelock to be a 
soldier, will help you to discharge all your duties. 
He is going to see you through. When loss comes; 
and you find your property going, just take this 
Book and put it down by your ledger, and read of 
the eternal possessions that will come to you through 
our Lord Jesus Christ. And when your business 
partner betrays you, and your friends turn against 
you, just take the insulting letter, put it down on the 
table, put your Bible beside the insulting letter, and 



BURDENS LIFTED. 



I8 5 



then read of the friendship of Him who "sticketh 
closer than a brother." 

A young accountant in New York City got his 
accounts entangled. He knew he was honest, and 
yet he could not made his accounts come out right, 
and he toiled at them day and night until he was 
nearly frenzied. It seemed by those books that 
something had been misappropriated, and he knew 
before God he was honest. The last day came. He 
knew if he could not that day make his accounts 
come out right, he would go into disgrace and go 
into banishment from the business establishment. 
He went over there very early, before there was 
anybody in the place, and he knelt down at the desk 
and said : "Oh, Lord, Thou knowest I have tried to 
be honest, but I can not make these things come out 
right! Help me to-day — help me this morning!" 
The young man arose, and hardly knowing why he 
did so, opened a book that lay on the desk, and there 
was a leaf containing a line of figures which explained 
everything. In other words, he cast his burden upon 
the Lord, and the Lord sustained him. Young man, 
do you hear that ? 

Oh, yes, God has a sympathy with anybody that 
is in any kind of toil! He knows how heavy is the 
hod of bricks that the workman carries up the ladder 
of the wall ; He hears the pickaxe of the miner down 
in the coal shaft ; He knows how strong the tempest 
strikes the sailor at masthead ; He sees the factory 
girl among the spindles, and knows how her arms 
ache ; He sees the sewing woman in the fourth 
story, and knows how few pence she gets for making 
a garment; and louder than all the din and roar 
of the city comes the voice of a sympathetic God: 



BURDENS LIFTED*. 



"Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and He shall sus- 
tain thee." 

Then there are a great many who have a weight 
of persecution and abuse upon them. Sometimes so- 
ciety gets a grudge against a man. All his motives 
are misinterpreted, and his good deeds are de- 
preciated. With more virtue than some of the hon- 
ored and applauded, he runs only against raillery 
and sharp criticism. When a man begins to go down, 
he has not only the force of natural gravitation, but 
a hundred hands to help him in the precipitation. 
Men are persecuted for their virtues, and their suc- 
cesses,. Germanicus said he had just as many bitter 
antagonists as he had adornments. The character 
sometimes is so lustrous that the weak eyes of Envy 
and Jealousy can not bear to look at it. 

It was their integrity that put Joseph in the pit, 
and Daniel in the den, and Shadrach in the fire, and 
sent John the Evangelist to desolate Patmos, and 
Calvin to the castle of persecution, and John Huss to 
the stake, and Korah after Moses, and Saul after 
David, and Herod after Christ. Be sure if you have 
anything to do for church or state, and you attempt 
it with all your soul, lightning will strike you. 

The world always has had a cross between two 
thieves for the one who comes to save it. High and 
holy enterprise has always been followed by abuse. 
The most sublime tragedy of self-sacrifice has come 
to burlesque. The graceful gait of virtue is always 
followed by scoffed with grimace and travesty. The 
sweetest strain of poetry ever written has come to 
ridiculous parody, and as long as there are virtue and 
righteousness in the world, there will be something 
for iniquity to grin at. All along the line of the ages, 



BURDENS LIFTED. 



18/ 



and in all lands, the cry has been : "Not this man, 
but Barabbas. Now, Barabbas was a robber." 

And what makes the persecutions of life worse, is 
that they come from people whom you have helped, 
from those to whom you loaned money or have 
started in business, or whom you rescued in some 
great crisis. I think it has been the history of all our 
lives — the most acrimonious assault has come from 
those whom we have benefited, whom we have 
helped, and that makes it all the harder to bear. A 
man is in danger of becoming cynical. 

A clergyman of the Universalist Church went into 
a neighborhood for the establishment of a church of 
his denomination, and he was anxious to find some 
one of that denomination, and he was pointed to a 
certain house, and went there. He said to the man 
of the house : "I understand you are a Universalist; 
I want you to help me in the enterprise." "Well," 
said the man, "I am a Universalist, but I have a pe- 
culiar kind of Universalism." What is that?" asked 
the minister. "Well," replied the other, "I have 
been out in the world, and I have been cheated, and 
slandered, and outraged, and abused, until I believe 
in universal damnation !" 

The great danger is that men will become cynical, 
and given to believe, as David was tempted to say, 
that all men are liars. Oh, my friends, do not let 
that be the effect upon your souls ! 

Now, if you have come across ill-treatment, let me 
tell you you are in excellent company — Christ, and 
Luther, and Galileo, and Columbus, and John Jay, 
and Josiah Quincy, and thousands of men and women, 
the best spirits of earth and heaven. Budge not one 
inch, though all hell wreak upon you its vengeance, 



i88 



BURDENS LIFTED. 



and you be made a target for devils to shoot at. Do 
you not think Christ knows all about persecution ? 
Was He not hissed at? Was He not struck on the 
cheek? Was He not pursued all the days of His 
life? Did they not expectorate upon Him? Or, to 
put it in Bible language, "They spit upon Him." 
And can not He understand what persecution is ? 
"Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and He shall sus- 
tain thee." 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

THE DAY WE LIVE IN. 

It is my business to tell you what style of men and 
women you ought to be in order that you may meet 
the demand of the age in which God has cast your 
lot. If you really would like to know what this age 
has a right to expect of you as Christian men and 
women, then I am ready, in the Lord's name, to look 
you in the face. When two armies have rushed into 
battle the officers of either army do not want a philo- 
sophical discussion about the chemical properties of 
human blood, or the nature of gunpowder ; they 
want some one to man the batteries and swab out the 
guns. And now, when all the forces of light and 
darkness, of heaven and hell, have plunged into the 
fight, it is no time to give ourselves to the definitions, 
and formulas, and technicalities, and conventionalities 
of religion. What we want is practical, earnest, con- 
centrated, enthusiastic, and triumphant help. 

In the first place, in order to meet the special de- 
mand of this age, you need to be an unmistakably 
aggressive Christian. Of half-and-half Christians we 
do not want any more. The Church of Jesus Christ 
will be better without ten thousand of them. They 
are the chief obstacle to the Church's advancement. 
I am speaking of another kind of Christian. All the 
appliances for your becoming an earnest Christian are 
at your hand, and there is a straight path for you into 

189 



I QO THE DAY WE LIVE IN. 

the broad daylight of God's forgiveness. You re- 
member what excitement there was in this country, 
years ago, when the Prince of Wales came here — 
how the people rushed out by hundreds of thousands 
to see him. Why? Because they expected that 
some day he would sit upon the throne of England. 
But what was all that honor compared with the honor 
to which God calls you — to be sons and daughters of 
the Lord Almighty ; yea, to be kings and queens 
unto God ? " They shall reign with Him forever and 
forever." 

But my friends, you need to be aggressive Chris- 
tians, and not like those persons who spend their lives 
in hugging their Christian graces, and wondering 
why they do not make any progress. How much 
robustness of health would a man have if he hid him- 
self in a dark closet ? A great deal of the piety of 
the day is too exclusive. It hides itself. It needs 
more fresh air, more outdoor exercise. There are 
many Christians who are giving their entire life to 
self-examination. They are feeling their pulse to see 
what is the condition of their spiritual health. How 
long would a man have robust physical health, if he 
kept all the days, and the weeks, and months, and 
years of his life feeling his pulse, instead of going out 
into active, earnest, everyday work ? 

I was once amid the wonderful, bewitching cactus 
growths of North Carolina. I never was more be- 
wildered with the beauty of flowers, and yet, when I 
would take up one of these cactuses, and pull the 
leaves apart, the beauty was all gone. You could 
hardly tell that it had ever been a flower. And there 
are a great many Christian people in this day just 
pulling apart their Christian experiences to see what 



THE DAY WE LIVE IN. 1 9 1 

there is in them, and there is nothing left in them. 
This style of self-examination is a damage instead of 
an advantage to their Christian character. I re- 
member when I was a boy I used to have a small 
piece in the garden that I called my own, and I 
planted corn there, and every few days I would pull 
it up to see how fast it was growing. Now, there are 
a great many Christian people in this day whose self- 
examination merely amounts to the pulling up of 
that which they only yesterday, or the day before, 
planted. 

Oh, my friends, if you want to have a stalwart 
Christian character, plant it right out-of-doors in the 
great field of Christian usefulness, and though storms 
may come upon it, and though the hot sun ol trial 
may try to consume it, it will thrive until it becomes 
a great tree, in which the fowls of heaven may have 
their habitation. I have no patience with these 
flower-pot Christians. They keep themselves under 
shelter, and all their Christian experience in a small, 
exclusive circle, when they ought to plant it in the 
great garden of the Lord, so that the whole atmos- 
phere could be aromatic with their Christian useful- 
ness. What we want in the Church of God is more 
brawn of piety. 

The century plant is wonderfully suggestive and 
wonderfully beautiful, but I never look at it without 
thinking of its parsimony. It lets whole generations 
go by before it puts forth one blossom ; so I have 
really more heartfelt admiration when I see the dewy 
tears in the blue eyes of the violets, for they come 
every spring. My Christian friends, time is going by 
so rapidly that we cannot afford to be idle. 

A recent statistician says that human life now has 



I Q2 THE DAY YVE LIVE IN. 

an average of only thirty-two years. From these 
thirty-two years you must subtract all the time you 
take for sleep, and the taking of food and recreation ; 
that will leave you about sixteen years. From those 
sixteen years you must subtract all the time that you 
are necessarily engaged in the earning of a liveli- 
hood ; that will leave you about eight years. From 
those eight years you must take all the days, and 
weeks, and months— all the length of time that is 
passed in childhood and sickness, leaving you about 
one year in which to work for God ! Oh, my soul, 
wake up ! How darest thou sleep in harvest-time, 
and with so few hours in which to reap? So that I 
state it as a simple fact, that all the time that the vast 
majority of you will have for the exclusive service of 
God will be less than one year ! 

" But," says some man, " I liberally support the 
Gospel, and the Church is open, and the Gospel is 
preached ; all the spiritual advantages are spread 
before men, and if they want to be saved let them 
come to be saved ; I have discharged all my respon- 
sibility." Ah! is that the Master's spirit ? Is there 
not an old Book somewhere that commands us to go 
out into the highways and the hedges, and compel 
the people to come in ? What would have become 
of you and me if Christ had not come down off the 
hills of heaven, and if He had not come through the 
door of the Bethlehem caravansary, and if He had 
not with the crushed hand of the crucifixion'knocked 
at the iron gate of the sepulchre of our spiritual 
death, crying, " Lazarus, come forth?" Oh, my 
Christian friends, this is no time for inertia, when all 
the forces of darkness seem to be in full blast ; when 
steam printing presses are publishing infidel tracts ; 



THE DAY WE LIVE IN. 1 93 

when express railroad trains are carrying messengers 
of sin ; when fast clippers are laden with opium and 
rum ; when the night air of our cities is polluted 
with the laughter that breaks up from the ten thou- 
sand saloons of dissipation and abandonment ; when 
the fires of the second death already are kindled in 
the cheeks of some who only a little while ago were 
incorrupt. Oh, never since the curse fell upon the 
earth has there been a time when it was such an 
unwise, such a cruel, such an awful thing for the 
Church to sleep. The great audiences are not gath- 
ered in the Christian Church ; the great audiences 
are gathered in the temples of sin — tears of unuttera- 
ble woe their baptism, the blood of crushed hearts 
the awful wine of their sacrament, blasphemies their 
litany, and the groans of the lost world the organ 
dirge of their worship. 

Again, if you want to be qualified to meet the 
duties which this age demands of you, you must on 
the one hand avoid reckless iconoclasm, and on the 
other hand not stick too much to things because they 
are old. The air is full of new plans, new projects, 
new theories of government, new theologies, and I 
am amazed to see how so many Christians want only 
novelty in order to recommend a thing to their con- 
fidence ; and so they vacillate, and swing to and fro, 
and they are useless, and they are unhappy. New 
plans — secular, ethical, philosophical, religious, cisat- 
lantac, transatlantic — long enough to make a line 
reaching from the German universities to Great Salt 
Lake City. Ah, my brother, do not take hold of a 
thing merely because it is new. Try it by the reali- 
ties of a Judgment Day. 

But, on the other hand, do not adhere to anything 

13 



194 THE DAY WE LIVE IN. 

merely because it is old. There is not a single enter- 
prise of the Church or the world but has sometimes 
been scoffed at. There was a time when men derided 
even Bible societies ; and when a few young men 
met near a haystack in Massachusetts and organized 
the first missionary society ever organized in this 
country, there went laughter and ridicule all around 
the Christian Church. They said the undertaking 
was preposterous. And so also the work of Jesus 
Christ was assailed. People cried out : " Who ever 
heard of such theories of ethics and government? 
Who ever noticed such a style of preaching as Jesus 
has?" Ezekiel had talked of mysterious wings and 
wheels. Here came a man from Capernaum and 
Gennesaret, and he drew his illustrations from the 
lakes, from the sand, from the ravine, from the lilies, 
from the cornstalks. How the Pharisees scoffed! 
How Herod derided ! How Caiaphas hissed. And 
this Jesus they plucked by the beard, and they spat 
in his face, and they called him " this fellow ! " All 
the great enterprises in and out of the Church have 
at times been scoffed at, and there have been a great 
multitude who have thought that the chariot of 
God's truth would fall to pieces if it once got out of 
the old rut. 

And so there are those who have no patience with 
anything like improvement in church architecture, 
or with anything like good, hearty, earnest church 
singing, and they deride any form of religious discus- 
sion which goes down walking among everyday men 
rather than that which makes an excursion on rhetor- 
ical stilts. Oh, that the Church of God would wake 
up to an adaptability of work ! We must admit the 
simple fact that the churches of Jesus Christ in this 



THE DAY WE LIVE IN. 



195 



day do not reach the great masses. There are fifty 
thousand people in Edinburgh who never hear the 
Gospel. There are one million people in London 
who never hear the Gospel. There are at least three 
hundred thousand souls in the city of Brooklyn who 
come not under the immediate ministrations of 
Christ's truth, and the Church of God in this day, 
instead of being a place full of living epistles, read 
and known of all men, is more like a " dead-letter " 
postoffice. 

"But," say the people, "the world is going to be 
converted ; you must be patient ; the kingdoms of 
this world are to become the kingdoms of Christ." 
Never, unless the Church of Jesus Christ puts on 
more speed and energy. Instead of the Church con- 
verting the world, the world is converting the 
Church. Here is a great fortress. How shall it be 
taken? An army comes and sits around about it, 
cuts off the supplies, and says ; " Now we will just 
wait until from exhaustion and starvation they will 
have to give up." Weeks and months, and perhaps 
a year pass along, and finally the fortress surrenders 
through that starvation and exhaustion. But, my 
friends, the fortresses of sin are never to be taken in 
that way. If they are taken for God it will be by 
storm ; you will have to bring up the great siege 
guns of the Gospel to the very wall and wheel the 
flying artillery into line, and when the armed infantry 
of heaven shall confront the battlements you will 
have to give the quick command, " Forward ! 
Charge ! " 

Ah, my friends, there is work for you to do and 
for me to do in order to this grand accomplishment. 
Here is my pulpit and I preach in it. Your pulpit is 



I96 THE DAY WE LIVE IN. 

the bank. Your pulpit is the store. Your pulpit is 
the editorial chair. Your pulpit is the anvil. Your 
pulpit is the house scaffolding. Your pulpit is the 
mechanic's shop. I may stand in this place and, 
through cowardice or through self-seeking, may keep 
back the word I ought to utter; while you, with 
sleeve rolled up and brow besweated with toil, may 
utter the word that will jar the foundations of heaven 
with the shout of a great victory. I tell you, every 
one, go forth and preach this gospel. You have as 
much right to preach as I have, or as any man has. 
Only find out the pulpit where God will have you 
preach and there preach. 

Hedley Vicars was a wicked man in the English 
army. The grace of God came to him. He became 
an earnest and eminent Christian. They scoffed at 
him and said : " You are a hypocrite ; you are as bad 
as ever you were." Still he kept his faith in Christ, 
and after awhile, finding that they could not turn 
him aside by calling him a hypocrite, they said to 
him : " Oh, you are nothing but a Methodist." That 
did not disturb him. He went on performing his 
Christian duty until he had formed all his troop into 
a Bible class, and the whole encampment was shaken 
with the presence of God. So Havelock went into 
the heathen temple in India while the English army 
was there, and put a candle into the hand of each of 
the heathen gods that stood around in the heathen 
temple, and by the light of those candles, held up by 
the idols, General Havelock preached righteousness, 
temperance, and judgment to come. And who will 
say, on earth or in heaven, that Havelock had not 
the right to preach? 

In the minister's house where I prepared for col- 



THE DAY WE LIVE IN. 1 97 

lege there was a man who worked, by the name of 
Peter Croy. He could neither read nor write, but 
he was a man of God. Often theologians would stop 
in the house — grave theologians — and at family 
prayer Peter Croy would be called upon to lead ; 
and all those wise men sat around, wonder-struck at 
his religious efficiency. When he prayed he reached 
up and seemed to take hold of the very throne of the 
Almighty, and he talked with God until the very 
heavens were bowed down into the sitting room. 
Oh, if I were dying I would rather have plain Peter 
Croy kneel by my bedside and commend my immor- 
tal spirit to God than the greatest archbishop, 
arrayed in costly canonicals. Go preach this Gospel. 
You say you are not licensed. In the name of the 
Lord Almighty, I license you. Go preach this Gos- 
pel — preach it in the Sabbath schools, in the prayer 
meetings, in the highways,- in the hedges. Woe be 
unto you if you preach it not. 

Again, in order to be qualified to meet your duty 
in this particular age you want unbounded faith in 
the triumph of truth and the overthrow of wicked- 
ness. How dare the Christian Church ever get dis- 
couraged. Have we not the Lord Almighty on our 
side ? How long did it take God to slay the hosts of 
Sennacherib or burn Sodom, or shake down Jericho ? 
How long will it take God, when He once rises in 
His strength, to overthrow all the forces of iniquity? 
Between this time and that there may be long seasons 
of darkness — the chariot wheels of God's Gospel may 
seem to drag heavily, but here is the promise and 
yonder is the throne ; and when omniscience has lost 
its eyesight, and omnipotence falls back impotent, 
and Jehovah is driven from His throne, then the 



198 THE DAY WE LIVE IN. 

Church of Jesus Christ can afford to be despondent, 
but never until then. Despots may plan and armies 
may march, and the congresses of the nations may 
seem to think they are adjusting all the affairs of the 
world, but the mighty men of the earth are only the 
dust of the chariot wheels of God's providence. 

I think before the sun of this century shall set the 
last tyranny will fall, and with a splendor of demon- 
stration that shall be the astonishment of the universe 
God will set forth the brightness and pomp and glory 
and perpetuity of His eternal government. Out of 
the starry flags and the emblazoned insignia of this 
world God will make a path for His own triumph, 
and returning from universal conquest, He will sit 
down, the grandest, strongest, highest throne of 
earth His footstool. 

Then shall all nations' song ascend 
To Thee, our Ruler, Father, Friend, 
Till heaven's high arch resounds again 
With " Peace on earth, good will to men." 

Hosts of the living God, march on! march on! 
His spirit will bless you. His shield will defend you. 
His sword will strike for you. March on ! march on ! 
The despotisms will fall, and paganism will burn its 
idols, and Mohammedanism will give up its false 
prophet, and Judaism will confess the true Messiah, 
and the great walls of superstition will come down in 
thunder and wreck at the long, loud blast of the Gos- 
pel trumpet. March on ! march on ! The besiegement 
will soon be ended. Only a few more steps on the 
long way ; only a few more sturdy blows ; only a 
few more battle cries, then God will put the laurel 
upon your brow, and from the living fountains of 



THE DAY WE LIVE IN. 



I 99 



heaven will bathe off the sweat and the heat and the 
dust of the conflict. March on ! march on ! For 
you the time for work will soon be passed, and amid 
the out-flashings of the judgment throne, and the 
trumpeting of resurrection angels, and the upheaving 
of a world of graves, and the hosanna and the groan- 
ing of the saved and the lost, we shall be rewarded 
for our faithfulness, or punished for our stupidity. 
Blessed be the Lord God of Israel from everlasting 
to everlasting, and let the whole earth be filled with 
His glory. 



* 



CHAPTER XIX. 

THE OLD FOLKS' VISIT. 

Blessed is that home where Christian parents come 
to visit. Whatever may have been the style of the 
architecture when they come, it is a palace before 
they leave. If they visit you fifty times, the two 
most memorable visits will be the first and the last. 
Those two pictures will hang in the hall of your 
memory while memory lasts, and you will remember 
just how they looked, and where they sat, and what 
they said, and at what figure of the carpet, and at 
what doorsill they parted with you, giving you the 
final good-bye. Do not be embarrassed if your father 
come to town and he have the manners of the shep- 
herd, and if your mother come to town, and there be 
in her hat no sign of costly millinery. The wife of 
Emperor Theodosius said a wise thing when she 
said: "Husband, remember what you lately were, 
and remember what you are, and be thankful." 

"What a nuisance it is to have poor relations !" 
• Joseph did not say that, but he rushed out to meet 
his father with perfect abandon of affection and 
brought him up to the palace, and introduced him to 
the Emperor, and provided for all the rest of the 
father's day, and nothing was too good for the old 
man while living ; and when he was dead, Joseph, 
with military escort, took his father's remains to the 
family cemetery at Machpelah, and put them down 

200 



THE OLD FOLKS' VISIT. 



201 



beside Rachel, Joseph's mother. Would God all 
children were as kind to their parents ! 

If the father have large property, and he be wise 
enough to keep it in his own name, he will be re- 
spected by the heirs ; but how often it is when the 
son finds his father in famine, as Joseph found Jacob 
in famine, the young people make it very hard for 
the old man. They are so surprised he eats with a 
knife instead of a fork. They are chagrined at his 
antediluvian habits. They are provoked because he 
can not hear as well as he used to, and when he asks 
it over again, and the son has to repeat it, he bawls 
in the old man's ear: "I hope you hear that!" How 
long he must wear the old coat or the old hat before 
they get him a new one ! How chagrined they are 
at his independence of the English grammar ! How 
long he hangs on ! Seventy years and not gone yet! 
Seventy-five years and not gone yet ! Eighty years 
and not gone yet! Will he ever go? They think it 
of no use to have a doctor in his last sickness, and go 
up to the drugstore and get a dose of something that 
makes him worse, and economize on a coffin, and 
beat the undertaker down to the last point, giving a 
note for the reduced amount, which they never pay ! 
I have officiated at obsequies of aged people where 
the family have been so inordinately resigned to the 
Providence that I felt like taking my text from Prov- 
erbs: "The eye that mocketh at its father, and 
refuseth to obey its mother, the ravens of the valley 
shall pick it out, and the young eagles shall eat it." 
In other words, such an ingrate ought to have a flock 
of crows for pall-bearers! I congratulate you if you 
have the honor of providing for aged parents. The 
blessing of the Lord God of Joseph and Jacob will 
be on you. 



202 



THE OLD FOLKS' VISIT. 



Share your successes with the old people. The 
probability is, that the principles they inculcated 
achieved your fortune. Give them a Christian per- 
centage of kindly consideration. Let Joseph divide 
with Jacob the pasture fields of Goshen and the 
glories of the Egyptian court. 

And here I would like to sing the praises of the 
sisterhood who remained unmarried that they might 
administer to aged parents. The brutal world calls 
these self-sacrificing ones by ungallant names, and 
says they are peculiar or angular ; but if you had 
had as many annoyances as they have had, Xantippe 
would have been an angel compared with you. It is 
easier to take care of five rollicking, romping chil- 
dren than of one childish old man. Among the best 
women of Brooklyn, and of yonder transpontive city 
are those who allowed the bloom of life to pass away 
while they were caring for their parents. While 
other maidens were sound asleep, they were soaking 
the old man's feet, or tucking up the covers around 
the invalid mother. While other maidens were in 
the cotillon, they were dancing attendance upon 
rheumatism, and spreading plasters for the lame 
back of the septenarian, and heating catnip tea for 
insomnia. 

In almost every circle of our kindred there has 
been some queen of self-sacrifice to whom jeweled 
hand after jeweled hand was offered in marriage, but 
who staid on the old place because of the sense of 
filial obligation, until the health was gone, and the 
attractiveness of personal presence had vanished. 
Brutal society may call such a one by a nickname. 
God calls her daughter, and Heaven calls her saint, 
and I call her domestic martyr. A half-dozen ordi- 



THE OLD FOLKS' VISIT. 



203 



nary women have not as much nobility as could be 
found in the smallest joint of the little finger of her 
left hand. Although the world has stood six thou- 
sand years, this is the first apotheosis of maidenhood, 
although in the long line of those who have declined 
marriage that they might be qualified for some 
especial mission, are the names of Anna Ross, and 
Margaret Breckinridge, and Mary Shelton, and Anna 
Etheridge, and Georgiana Willetts, the angels of the 
battlefields of Fair Oaks, and Lookout Mountain, 
and Chancellorsville, and Cooper Shop Hospital; 
and though single life has been honored by the fact 
that the three grandest men of the Bible — John, and 
Paul, and Christ — were celibates. 

Let the ungrateful world sneer at the maiden aunt, 
but God has a throne burnished for her arrival, and 
on one side of that throne in heaven there. is a vase 
containing two jewels, the one brighter than the 
Kohinoor of London Tower, and the other larger 
than any diamond ever found in the districts of Gol- 
conda — the one jewel by the lapidary of the palace, 
cut with the words : " Inasmuch as ye did it to 
father ; " the other jewel by the lapidary of the pal- 
ace, cut with the words : "Inasmuch as ye did it to 
mother." 

As if to disgust us with unfilial conduct, the Bible 
presents us the story of Micah, who stole the eleven 
hundred shekels from his mother, and the story of 
Absalom, who tried to dethrone his father. But all 
history is beautiful with stories of filial fidelity. 
Epaminondas, the warrior, found his chief delight in 
reciting to his parents his victories. There goes 
^Eneas from burning Troy, on his shoulders, Anch- 
ises, his father. The Athenians punished with death 



204 



THE OLD FOLKS' VISIT. 



any unfilial conduct. There goes beautiful Ruth 
escorting venerable Naomi across the desert, amid 
the howling of the wolves and the barking of the 
jackals. • John Lawrence burned at the stake in Col- 
chester, was cheered in the flames by his children, 
who said : "O God, strengthen thy servant, and 
keep thy promise !" And Christ, in the hour of ex- 
cruciation, provided for His old mother. Jacob kept 
his resolution, " I will go and see him before I die," 
and a little while after, we find them walking the 
tessellated floor of the palace, Jacob and Joseph, the 
prime-minister proud of the shepherd. 



CHAPTER XX. 



ORDINARY PEOPLE. 

" Salute Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermas, Patrobas, Hermes, Philo- 
logns and Julia" — Romans, 16: 14, 15. 

Matthew Henry, Albert Barnes, Adam Clark, 
Thomas Scott, and all the commentators pass by 
these verses without any especial remark. The 
other twenty people mentioned in the chapter were 
distinguished for something, and were therefore dis- 
cussed by the illustrious expositors ; but nothing is 
said about Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermas, Patrobas, 
Hermes, Philologus, and Julia. Where were they 
born? No one knows. When did they die ? There 
is no record of their decease. For what were they 
distinguished ? Absolutely for nothing, or the trait 
of character would have been brought out by the 
apostle. If they had been very intrepid, or opulent, 
or hirsute, or musical of cadence, or crass of style, or 
in any wise anomalous, that feature would have been 
caught by the apostolic camera. But they were good 
people, because Paul sends to them his high Chris- 
tian regards. They were ordinary people, moving 
in ordinary sphere, attending to ordinary duty, and 
meeting ordinary responsibilities. 

What the world wants is a religion for ordinary 
people. If there be in the United States 55,000,000 
people, there are certainly not more than 1,000,000 
extraordinary ; and then there are 54,000,000 ordi- 

205 



206 



ORDINARY PEOPLE. 



nary, and we do well to turn our backs for a little 
while upon the distinguished and conspicuous people 
of the Bible and consider in our text the seven 
ordinary. We spend too much of our time in twist- 
ing- garlands for remarkables, and building thrones 
for magnates, and sculpturing warriors, and apotheo- 
sizing philanthropists. The rank and file of the 
Lord's soldiery need especial help. 

The vast majority of people will never lead an 
army, will never write a State constitution, will never 
electrify a Senate, will never make an important in- 
vention, will never introduce a new philosophy, will 
never decide the fate of a nation. You do not expect 
to ; you do not want to. You will not be a Moses to 
lead a nation out of bondag'e. You will not be a 
Joshua to prolong the daylight until you can shut five 
kings in a cavern. You will not be a St. John to un- 
roll an Apocalypse. You will not be a Paul to pre- 
side over an apostolic college. You will not be a 
Mary to mother a Christ. You will more probably 
be Asyncritus, or Phlegon, or Hermas, or Patrobas, 
or Hermes, or Philologus, or Julia. 

Many of you are women at the head of households. 
Every morning you plan for the day. The culinary 
department of the household is in your dominion. 
You decide all questions of diet. All the sanitary 
regulations of your house are under your supervi- 
sion. To regulate the food, and the apparel, and the 
habits, and decide the thousand questions of home 
life is a tax upon brain and nerve and general health 
absolutely appalling, if there be no divine alleviation. 

It does not help you much to be told that Elizabeth 
Fry did wonderful things amid the criminals at New- 
gate. It does not help you much to be told that Mrs. 



ORDINARY PEOPLE. 



207 



Judson was very brave among the Bornesian canni- 
bals. It does not help you very much to be told that 
Florence Nightingale was very kind to the wounded 
in the Crimea. It would be better for me to tell you 
that the divine friend of Mary and Martha is your 
friend, and that He sees all the annoyances and dis- 
appointments, and abrasions, and exasperations of an 
ordinary housekeeper from morn till night, and from 
the first day of the year to the last day of the year, 
and at your call He is ready with help and rein- 
forcement. 

They who provide the food of the world decide 
the health of the world. One of the greatest battles 
of this century was lost because the commander that 
morning had a fit of indigestion. You have only to 
go on some errand amid the taverns and the hotels 
of the United States and Great Britain to appreciate 
the fact, that a vast multitude of the human race are 
slaughtered by incompetent cookery. Though a 
young woman may have taken lessons in music, and 
may have taken lessons in painting, and lessons in 
astronomy, she is not well educated unless she has 
taken lessons in dough! They who decide the apparel 
of the world, and the food of the world, decide the 
endurance of the world. 

An unthinking man may consider it a matter of 
little importance — the cares of the household and the 
• economies of domestic life — but I tell you the earth 
is strewn with the martyrs of kitchen and nursery. 
The health-shattered womanhood of America cries 
out for a God who can help ordinary women in the 
ordinary duties of housekeeping. The wearing, 
grinding, unappreciated work goes on, but the same 
Christ who stood on the bank of Galilee in the early 



208 



ORDINARY PEOPLE. 



mornins" and kindled the fire and had the fish 
already cleaned and broiling when the sportsmen 
stepped ashore, chilled and hungry, will help every 
woman to prepare breakfast, whether by her own 
hand, or the hand of her hired help. The God who 
made indestructible eulogy of Hannah, who made a 
coat for Samuel, her son, and carried it to the temple 
every year, will help every woman in preparing the 
family wardrobe. The God who opens the Bible 
with the story of Abraham's entertainment by the 
three angels on the plains of Mamre, will help every 
woman to provide hospitality, however rare and em- 
barrassing. It is high time that some of the attention 
we have been giving to the remarkable women of the 
Bible — remarkable for their virtue, or their want of 
it, or remarkable for their deeds — Deborah and Jeze- 
bel, and Herodias and Athalia, and Dorcas and the 
Marys, excellent and abandoned— it is high time some 
of the attention we have been giving to these con- 
spicuous women of the Bible be given to Julia, an . 
ordinary woman, amid ordinary circumstances, at- 
tending to ordinary duties, and meeting ordinary 
responsibilities. 

Then there are all the ordinary business men. 

They need divine and Christian help. When we 
begin to talk about business life we shoot right off 
and talk about men who did business on a large scale, 
and who sold millions of dollars of goods a year ; and # 
the vast majority of business men do not sell a million 
dollars of goods, nor half a million, nor quarter of a 
million, nor the eighth part of a million. Put all the 
business men of our cities,' towns, villages, and neigh- 
borhoods side by side, and you will find that they sell 
less than fifty thousand dollars worth of goods. All 



ORDINARY PEOPLE. 



209 



these men in ordinary business lite want divine help. 
You see how the wrinkles are printing on the coun- 
tenance the story of worriment and care. You can 
not tell how old a business man is by looking at him. 
Gray hairs at thirty. A man at forty-five with the 
stoop of a nonogenarian. No time to attend to im- 
proved dentistry, the grinders cease because they are 
few. Actually dying of old age at forty or fifty, when 
they ought to be at the meridian. Many of these 
business men have bodies like a neglected clock to 
which you come, and you wind it up, and it begins 
to buzz and roar, and then the hands start around 
very rapidly, and then the clock strikes five, or ten, 
or forty, and strikes without any sense, and then sud- 
denly stops. So is the body of that worn out busi- 
ness man. It is a neglected clock, and though by 
some summer recreation it may be wound up, still 
the machinery is all out of gear. .The hands turn 
around with a velocity that excites the astonishment 
of the world. Man cannot understand the wonderful 
activity, and there is a roar, and a buzz, and a rattle 
about these disordered lives, and they strike ten 
when they ought to strike five, and they strike twelve 
when they ought to strike six, and they strike forty 
when they ought to strike nothing, and suddenly 
they stop. Post-mortem examination reveals the 
fact that all the springs, and pivots, and weights, and 
balance-wheels of health are completely deranged. 
The human clock is simply run down. And at the 
time when the steady hand ought to be pointing to 
the industrious hours on a clear and sunlit dial, the 
whole machinery of body, mind, and earthly capacity 
stops forever. Greenwood has thousands of New 
York and Brooklyn business men who died of old 
age at thirty, thirty-five, forty, forty-five. 



210 



ORDINARY PEOPLE. 



Now, what is Avanted is grace — divine grace for 
ordinary business men, men who are harnessed from 
morn till night and all the days of their life — har- 
nessed in business. Not grace to lose a hundred 
thousand, but grace to lose ten dollars. Not grace 
to supervise two hundred and fifty employes in a fac- 
tory, but grace to supervise the bookkeeper, and two 
salesmen, and the small boy that sweeps out the store. 
Grace to invest not in the eighty thousand dollars of 
net profit, but the twenty-five hundred of clear gain. 
Grace not to endure the loss of a whole shipload of 
spices from the Indies, but grace to endure the loss 
of a paper of collars from the leakage of a displaced 
shingle on a poor roof. Grace not to endure the 
tardiness of the American Congress in passing a 
necessary law, but grace to endure the tardiness of 
an errand boy stopping to play marbles when he 
ought to deliver the goods. Such a grace as thou- 
sands of business men have to-day — keeping them 
tranquil, whether goods sell or do not sell, whether 
customers pay or do not pay, whether tariff is up or 
tariff is down, whether the crops are luxuriant or a 
dead failure — calm in all circumstances, and amid all 
vicissitudes. That is the kind of grace we want. 

Millions of men want it, and they may have it for 
the asking. Some hero or heroine comes to town, and 
as the procession passes through the street the busi- 
ness men come out and stand on tiptoe on their store 
step and look at some one who in Arctic clime, or in 
ocean storm, or in day of battle, or in hospital agonies 
did the brave thing, not realizing that they, the en- 
thusiastic spectators, have gone through trials in 
business life that are just as great before God, There 
are men who have gone through freezing Arctics 



ORDINARY PEOPLE. 



211 



and burning torrids, and awful Marengoes of experi- 
ences without moving five miles from their doorstep. 

Now, what ordinary business men need is to realize 
that they have the friendship of that Christ who 
looked after the religious interests of Matthew, the 
custom-house clerk, and helped Lydia, of Thyatira, 
to sell the dry goods, and who opened a bakery and 
fish-market in the wilderness of Asia Minor to feed 
the seven thousand who had come out on a religious 
picnic, and who counts the hairs of your head with as 
much particularity as though they were the plumes 
of a coronation, and who took the trouble to stoop 
down with His finger writing on the ground, although 
the first shuffle of feet obliterated the divine cali- 
graphy, and who knows just how many loeusts there 
were in the Egyptian plague, and knew just how 
many ravens were necessary to supply Elijah's pantry 
by the brook Cherith, and who, as floral commander, 
leads forth all the regiments of primroses, foxgloves, 
daffodils, hyacinths, and lilies which pitch their tents 
of beauty and kindle their camp-fires of color all 
around the hemisphere — that that Christ and that 
God knows the most minute affairs of your business 
life and however inconsiderable, understanding all 
the affairs of that woman who keeps a thread-and- 
needle store as well as all the affairs of a Rothschild 
and a Baring. 

Then there are all the ordinary farmers. We talk 
about agricultural life, and we immediately shoot off 
to talk about Cincinnatus, the patrician, who went 
from the plow to a high position, and after he got 
through the dictatorship, in twenty-one days went 
back again to the plow. What encouragement is that 
to ordinary farmers ? The vast majority of them — none 



212 



ORDINARY PEOPLE. 



of them will be patricians. Perhaps none of them 
will be Senators. If any of them have dictatorships 
it will be over forty, or fifty, or a hundred acres of 
the old homestead. What those men want is grace, 
to keep their patience while plowing with balky 
oxen, and to keep cheerful amid the drouth that de- 
stroys the corn crop, and that enables them to restore 
the garden the day after the neighbor's cattle have 
broken in and trampled out the strawberry bed, and 
gone through the Lima-bean patch, and eaten up the 
sweet corn in such large quantities that they must be 
kept from the water lest they swell up and die. 

Grace in catching weather that enables them, with- 
out imprecation, to spread out the hay the third time, 
although again, and again, and again, it has been al 
most ready for the mow. A grace to doctor the cow* 
with a hollow horn, and the sheep with the foot rot, 
and the horse with the distemper, and to compel the 
unwilling acres to ) v ield a livelihood for the family, 
and schooling for the children, and little extras to 
help the older boy in business, and something for the 
daughter's wedding outfit, and a little surplus for the 
time when the ankles will get stiff with age, and the 
breath will be a little short, and the swinging of the 
cradle through the hot harvest-field will bring on the 
old man's vertigo. Better close up about Cincin- 
natus. I know five hundred farmers just as noble as 
he was. 

What they want is to know that they have the 
friendship of that Christ who often drew His similes 
from the farmer's life, as when he said : " A sower 
went forth to sow ;" as when He built His best para- 
ble out of the scene of a farmer's boy coming back 
from his wanderings, and the old farmhouse shook 



ORDINARY PEOPLE. 



213 



that night with rural jubilee ; and who compared 
Himself to a lamb in the pasture field, and who said 
that the eternal God is a farmer, declaring : " My 
Father is the husbandman." 

Those stone masons do not want to hear about 
Christopher Wren, the architect, who built St. Paul's 
Cathedral. It would be better to tell them how to 
carry the hod of brick up the ladder without slipping, 
and how on a cold morning with the trowel to 
smooth off the mortar and keep cheerful, and how to 
be thankful to God for the plain food taken from the 
pail by the roadside. Carpenters standing amid the 
adze, and the bit, and the plane, and the broad axe, 
need to be told that Christ was a carpenter, with his 
own hand wielding saw and hammer. Oh, this is a 
tired world, and it is an overworked world, and it is 
an under-fed world, and it is a rung-out world, and 
men and women need to know that there is rest and 
recuperation in God and in that religion which was 
not so much intended for extraordinary people as for 
ordinary people, because there are more of them. 

The healing profession has had its Abercrombies, 
and its Abernethys, and its Valentine Motts, and its 
Willard Parkers ; but the ordinary physicians do the 
most of the world's medicining, and they need to un- 
derstand that while taking diagnosis or prognosis, or 
writing prescription, or compounding medicament, 
or holding the delicate pulse of a dying child they 
may have the presence and the dictation of the 
Almighty Doctor who took the case of the madman, 
and, after he had torn off his garments in foaming de- 
mentia, clothed him again, body and mind, and who 
lifted up the woman who for eighteen years had been 
bent almost double with the rheumatism into grace- 



214 



ORDINARY PEOPLE. 



ful stature, and who turned the scabs of leprosy into 
rubicund complexion, and who rubbed the numbness 
out of paralysis, and who swung wide open the 
closed windows of hereditary or accidental blindness, 
until the morning light came streaming through the 
fleshly casements, and who knows all the diseases, 
and all the remedies, and all the herbs, and all the 
catholicons, and is monarch of pharmacy and thera- 
peutics, and who has sent out ten thousand doctors 
of whom the world makes no record ; but to prove 
that they are angels of mercy, I invoke the thousands 
of men whose ailments they have assuaged and the 
thousands of women to whom in crises of pain they 
have been next to God in benefaction. 

Come, now, let us have a religion for ordinary peo- 
ple in professions, in occupations, in agriculture, in 
the household, in merchandise, in everything. I 
salute across the centuries Asyncritus, Phlegon, Her- 
mas, Patrobas, Hermes, Philologus, and Julia. 

First of all, if you feel that you are ordinary, thank 
God that you are not extraordinary. I am tired and 
sick, and bored almost to death with extraordinary 
people. They take all their time to tell us how very 
extraordinary they really are. You know as well as I 
do, my brother and sister, that the most of the useful 
work of the world is done by unpretentious people 
who toil right on — by people who do not get much ap- 
proval, and no one seems to say, " That is well done." 
Phenomena are of but little use. Things that are ex- 
ceptional cannot be depended on. Better trust the 
smallest planet that swings in its orbit than ten 
comets shooting this way and that, imperilling the 
longevity of worlds attending to their own business. 
For steady illumination better is a lamp than a rocket. 



ORDINARY PEOPLE. 



215 



Then, if you feel that you are ordinary, remember 
that your position invites the less attack. Conspicu- 
ous people — how they have to take it ! How they 
are misrepresented, and abused, and shot at! The 
higher the horns of a roebuck the easier to track him 
down. What a delicious thing it must be to be a 
candidate for President of the United States ! It 
must be so soothing to the nerves ! It must pour 
into the souls of a candidate such a sense of serenity 
when he reads the blessed newspapers ! 

I came into the possession of the abusive cartoons 
in the time of Napoleon I., printed while he was yet 
alive. The retreat of the army from Moscow, that 
army buried in the snows of Russia, one of the most 
awful tragedies of the centuries, represented under 
the figure of a monster called General Frost shaving 
the French Emperor with a razor of icicle. As Satyr 
and Beelzebub he is represented, page after page, 
page after page. England cursing him, Spain curs- 
ing him, Germany cursing him, Russia cursing him, 
Europe cursing him, North and South America curs- 
ing him. The most remarkable man of his day, and 
the most abused. All those men in history who now 
have a halo around their name, on earth wore a 
crown of thorns. Take the few extraordinary rail- 
road men of our time, and see what abuse comes upon 
them, while thousands of stockholders escape. New 
York Central Railroad has 9,265 stockholders. If 
anything in that railroad affronts the people all the 
abuse comes down on one man, and the 9,264 escape. 
All the world took after Thomas Scott, President of 
the Pennsylvania Railroad, abused him until he got 
under the ground. Over 17,000 stockholders in that 
company. All the blame on one man ! The Central 



2l6 



ORDINARY PEOPLE. 



Pacific Railroad — two or three men get all the blame 
if anything goes wrong. There are 10,000 in that 
company. 

I mention these things to prove it is extraordinary 
people who get abused, while the ordinary escape. 
The weather of life is not so severe on the plain as it 
is on the high peaks. The world never forgives a 
man who knows, or gains, or does more than it can 
know, or gain, or do. Parents sometimes give con- 
fectionery to their children as an inducement to take 
bitter medicine, and the world's sugar-plum precedes 
the world's aqua-fortis. The mob cried in regard to 
Christ, Crucify Him, crucify Him !" and they had 
to say it twice to be understood, for they were so 
hoarse, and they got their hoarseness by crying a 
little while before at the top of their voice, "Hosanna." 
The river Rhone is foul when it enters Lake Leman, 
but crystalline when it comes out on the other side. 
But there are men who have entered the bright lake 
of wordly prosperity crystalline and came out terribly 
riled. If, therefore, you feel that you are ordinary, 
thank God for the defences and the tranquility of 
your position. 

Let us all be content with such things as we have. 
God is just as good in what He keeps away from us 
as in what he gives us. Even a knot may be useful 
if it is at the end of a thread. 

At an anniversary of a deaf and dumb asylum, one 
of the children wrote upon the blackboard words as 
sublime as the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the " Divina 
Comedia" all compressed in one paragraph. The 
examiner, in the signs of the mute language, asked 
her : " Who made the world ? " The deaf and dumb 
girl wrote upon the blackboard, " In the beginning 



ORDINARY PEOPLE. 



217 



God created the heaven and the earth." The ex- 
aminer asked her, " For what purpose did Christ 
come into the world?" The deaf and dumb girl 
wrote upon the blackboard : " This is a faithful say- 
ing, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus 
came into the world to save sinners." The ex- 
aminer said to her, " Why were you born deaf and 
dumb, while I hear and speak?" She wrote upon 
the blackboard : " Even so, Father ; for so it seemeth 
good in thy sight." Oh, that we might be baptized 
with a contented spirit ! The spider draws poison 
out of a flower, the bee gets honey out of a thistle; 
but happiness is a heavenly elixir, and the contented 
spirit extracts it, not from the rhododendron of the 
hills, but from the lily of the valley. 



CHAPTER XXI. 



THE LACHRYMAL. 

Within the past century travelers and antiquarians 
have explored the ruins of ancient cities, and from the 
very heart of the buried splendor they have brought 
up evidence of customs long ago vanished from the 
earth. From some of those tombs they have brought 
up lachrymatories, or lachrymals, which are vials 
made of earthenware. The tears wept over the dead 
were caught and kept in this vial, or lach^matory 
or lachrymal, or bottle, and then the bottle was 
placed in the tomb of the dead. There are in our 
museums to-day, if you will search for them, many 
specimens of these tear-bottles of olden times. 

The tears that were brought up in the lachrymals 
of Herculaneum and Pompeii have all gone, and 
those bottles are as dry as the scoria of the volcano 
that submerged them ; but not so with the bottle in 
which God gathers all our tears. So it is not a mere 
soft sentiment, it is not only a poetic idea, but it is a 
deep and an earnest expression of hundreds of people 
here who have had misfortune, or trial, or loss, or be- 
reavement, when they cry out, saying : " Put thou 
my tears into thy bottle." 

You have all heard .of the story of paradise and the 
peri. I think it might come to a better adaptation. 
An angel went forth from heaven, and searched all 
the earth to find some beautiful thing worthy of celes- 

218 



\ 



i 



THE LACHRYMAL. 22 1 

tial transportation. That angel went down to the 
gold and silver mines of the earth, yet found nothing 
worthy of carrying back to God and to heaven. And 
then the angel went down to the depths of the sea, 
and examined all the pearls that lay there, but not 
one of them was fit to take to heaven, and the angel, 
utterly discouraged and despairing, stood at the foot 
of a mountain and folded its wing, when, looking a 
little way off, it saw a wanderer weeping over his evil 
ways, and as the tears were falling down the cheek of 
that wanderer the angel thrust its wing under the fall- 
ing tear and captured it, and then sped away toward 
the sky, and as God saw the angel flying heavenward 
with that tear upon the wing, God cried out ; " Be- 
hold the brightest jewel of heaven, the tear of a sin- 
ner's repentance." 

Oh, when I see the shepherd bringing a lost sheep 
back from the wilderness, when I hear the quick tread 
of a ragged prodigal coming to his father's house, 
when I see the sin burned, and the passion blasted, 
and the wretched and the vile appealing for God's 
compassion, then I break forth into ecstasy and tri- 
umph, and I cry : " More tears for God's bottle ! " I 
remember only one or two lines of the old hymn 
which says : 

w Or sins like mountains for their size, 
The seas of sovereign grace expand; 
The seas of sovereign grace arise." 

« 

O wanderer, come back to thy God. That falling 
tear will not drop on the cheek, it will not drop on 
your hand ; it will drop into the bottle where God 
keeps all our tears. God has an intimate acquaint- 
ance with and a tender remembrance of all poverty. 
Much of the world's want does not come to inspec- 



222 



THE LACHRYMAL. 



tion. Deacons of the church do not see it, controllers 
of almshouses never report it. People who prefer to 
suffer and to die in silence rather than to display 
their poverty and their bitterness. Parents who fail 
to get a livelihood so that they with their children 
dwell in perpetual privation. Sewing women who 
cannot ply the needle fast enough to earn shelter and 
bread. 

Sorrow and privation and woe huger than a camel 
going through the eye of their needle. But whether 
reported or uncomplaining, whether in seemingly 
comfortable parlor or in damp cellar, or in hot gar- 
ret, the angels of God watch. All those griefs are 
being collected. Down on the back street, away off 
amid shanties and log huts, angels of God are watch- 
ing. Tears of want seething in summer's heat, tears 
of want freezing in winter's cold, fall not unheeded. 
They are jewels in heaven's casket. They are 
pledges of divine sympathy. They are tears for 
God's bottle. 

When some years ago a city missionary was cross- 
ing one of the parks in New York on the Sabbath 
day, he said to a lad, " What are you doing here, 
breaking the Lord's day ? You ought to be at church 
and worshiping God instead of breaking the Sabbath 
in this way." Then the poor lad in his rags looked 
up at the city missionary, and said : " Oh, sir, it's very 
easy for you to talk that way, but God knows that 
we poor chaps ain't got no chance." Oh, that the* 
tears of all the poor might drop into God's bottle. 

God has an intimate acquaintance with and a ten- 
der remembrance of, all our parental anxiety. You 
sometimes see a man step right out from the most in- 
famous surroundings into the kingdom of God. You 



THE LACHRYMAL. 



223 



say, " That is not logical ; that man has not heard a 
sermon in twenty years ; that man has not had any 
alarming providence ; why is it he steps right out 
from the most debased surroundings into the king- 
dom of God ?" This is the secret : God one day looks 
at the bottle in which He keeps the tears of His dear 
children, and He finds there a parental tear which for 
forty years has been unanswered, and He says, " Go 
to now, and I will answer that tear." Quick as light- 
ning to the heart of that debased and wandering man 
comes the influence of the Holy Ghost, and he steps 
out of his sin into the light of the Gospel. 

Oh, this work of training children for God and for 
heaven is a tremendous work. I know there are a 
great many people who have not been called to pa- 
rental responsibility, who have a very complete idea 
about domestic discipline. They know how children 
ought to be trained ! But to every intelligent parent 
it is a tremendous question. 

Now there is a little child, and it is a beautiful play- 
thing. It lies in the mother's arms. She looks down 
into the bright eyes, and she examines the dimples on 
its feet, and she says : " What an exquisite organ- 
ism." Beautiful plaything that child is. But one 
night while that mother is rocking that child to sleep 
a voice drops straight from the throne of God, say- 
iag : " Do you know what you are rocking? That 
is an immortal." Stars shall die, but that is an im- 
mortal. The sun will die of old age, but that is 
immortal. 

With some of you this is the chief anxiety. You 
try to train your children aright. You correct this 
folly, you chide that worldliness, and your midnight 
pillow is wet with weeping in parental anxiety ; and 



224 



THE LACHRYMAL. 



you ask me to-day, you ask me in silence; but I hear 
the question coming up from hundreds of souls : " Is 
all this wasted ? Are my prayers going to be heard ? 
Is all this solicitude for nothing?" I answer no. 
God has counted all the sleepless nights. God has 
heard all the counsels you ever gave to that boy or 
that girl in your household. God knows it all, and 
He has kept a record, and in lachrymal — not such as 
is taken up from ancient sepulchre, but in a lachry- 
mal that stands on His eternal throne, He has gath- 
ered all those exhausting tears. 

The grass may be rank on your grave, and the let- 
ters may have faded from the tombstone under the 
dash of the elements, but He who has said, " I will be 
a God to thee and to thy seed after thee," will not 
forget, and some day in heaven, while you are rang- 
ing the fields of light, the gates of pearl will open, 
and garlanded with glory that wanderer will rush 
into your outstretched arms of welcome and triumph. 
The hills may depart, and the stars may fall, and the 
world may burn, and time may perish, but God will 
break His oath — never, never! 

But you say, " Why keep in heaven the tears of 
earth? why that great lachrymatory on the throne<of 
God ?" Well, my friends, I do not know that the tears 
will always stay there. I do not know but that after 
awhile some angel passing along will look at that great 
lachrymatory of heaven and find it empty. What 
sprite of hell hath broken into the gates and robbed 
that place of its jewels? This is the secret : Those 
were sanctified sorrows, and those tears have been 
changed into pearl, and now they adorn the coronets 
and the robes of the ransomed. 

I take up some coronet of light and I see gems 



THE LACHRYMAL. 22 5 

sparkling in it, and say, " From what river depth of 
heaven clid these jewels come?" and a thousand 
voices answer : " These are the transmuted tears 
from God's bottle/' Then I see a scepter stretched 
down from the throne of men who were trodden on 
by earth, and I see on every scepter point, and I see 
inlaid in the ivory stair of the golden throne some 
very bright jewels, and I say, " Whence came they? 
whence came they?" and the elders from before the 
throne, and the martyrs under the altar coming up 
and standing on the sea of glass, cry in ecstasy, 
" These are the transmuted tears from God's bottle." 

Let the ages of heaven roll on. All the pomp and 
pride of earth forgotten ; the Koh-i-noor diamonds 
that we're the pride of kings forgotten; precious 
stones that adorned Persian tiara or flamed in the 
robes of Babylonian processions, forgotten ; the Gol- 
conda mines charred in the last conflagration ; but 
firm as the everlasting hills, and pure as the light 
that streams from the throne, and bright as the river 
that flows from under the eternal rocks, are the trans- 
muted tears from God's bottle. Let that empty 
lachrymatory stand forever on the steps of heaven, 
on the steps of the throne. Let no hand touch it. 
Let no wing strike it. Let no collision crack it. 
Purer than beryl or chrysoprasus, let it stand on the 
steps of Jehovah's throne, and under the arch of the 
unfading rainbow. Passing down the corridors of 
the palace, the redeemed of earth will look at it, and 
think of their earthly sorrows sanctified, and say, 
" Why, that is what we heard of on earth ; that is 
what the Psalmist spoke of ; there is where our tears 
were kept; that is God's bottle." And while the 
redeemed of heaven are gazing on this richest inlaid 



226 



THE LACHRYMAL. 



vase in glory, all the towers of heaven will strike this 
silvery chime : " God hath wiped away all tears from 
all faces. God hath wiped away all tears from all 
faces." 



CHAPTER XXII. 



SUNSET. 

It is a dismal thing to be getting old without the 
rejuvenating influence of religion. When we step on 
the down grade of life and see that it dips to the 
verge of the cold river, we want to behold some one 
near who will help us across it. When the sight 
loses its power to glance and gather up, we need the 
faith that can illumine. When we feel the failure of 
the ear, we need the clear tones of that voice which 
in olden times broke up the silence of the deep with 
cadences of mercy. When the axe-men of death 
hew down whole forests of strength and beauty 
around us and we are left in solitude, we need the 
dove of divine mercy to sing in our branches. When 
the shadows begin to fall and we feel that the day is 
far spent, we need most of all to supplicate the 
strong, beneficent Jesus in the prayer of the villagers, 
" Abide with us, for it is toward evening." 

The request is an appropriate exclamation for all 
those who are approached in the gloomy hour of 
temptation. There is nothing easier than to be good- 
natured when everything pleases, or to be humble 
when there is nothing to oppose us, or forgiving 
when we have not been assailed, or honest when we 
have no inducement to fraud. But you have felt the 
grapple of some temptation. Your nature at some 
time quaked and groaned under the infernal force. 

227 



228 



SUNSET. 



You felt that the devil was after you. You saw 
your Christian graces retreating. You feared that 
you would fail in the awful wrestle with sin and be 
thrown into the dust. The gloom thickened. The 
first indications of the night were seen. In all the 
trembling of your soul, in all the infernal suggestions 
of Satan, in all the surging up of tumultuous passions 
and excitements, you felt with awful emphasis that it 
was toward evening. 

In the tempted hour you need to ask Jesus to abide 
with you. You can beat back the monster that 
would devour you. You can unhorse the sin that 
would ride you down. You can sharpen the battle- 
axe with which you split the head of helmeted abom- 
ination. Who helped Paul shake the brazen-gated 
heart of Felix ? Who acted like a good sailor when 
all the crew howled in the Mediterranean shipwreck? 
Who helped the martyrs to be firm, when one word 
of recantation would have unfastened the withes of 
the stake and put out the kindling fire ? When the 
night of the soul came on and all the denizens of 
darkness came riding upon the winds of perdition — 
who gave strength to the soul ? Who gave calmness 
to the heart? Who broke the spell of infernal 
enchantment? He who heard the request'of the vil- 
lagers : " Abide with us for it is toward evening." 

One of the forts of France was attacked and the 
outworks were taken before night. The besieging 
army lay down, thinking that there was but little to 
do in the morning, and that the soldiery in the fort 
could be easily made to surrender. But during the 
night, through a back stairs, they escaped into the 
country. In the morning the besieging army sprang 
upon the battlements, but found that their prey was 



SUNSET. 



229 



gone. So when we are assaulted in temptation, there 
is always some secret stair by which we might get 
off. God will not allow us to be tempted above 
what we are able, but with every temptation will 
bring a way of escape that we may be able to bear it. 

The greatest folly that ever grew on this planet is 
the tendency to borrow trouble ; but there are times 
when approaching sorrow is so evident that we need 
to be making especial preparations for its coming. 

One of your children has lately become a favorite. 
The cry of that child strikes deeper into the heart 
than the cry of all the others. You think more 
about it. You give it more attention, not because it 
is any more of a treasure than the others, but be- 
cause it is becoming frail. There is something in the 
cheek, in the eye and in the walk that makes you 
quite sure that the leaves of the 'flower are going to 
be scattered. The utmost nursing and medical at- 
tendance are ineffectual. The pulse becomes feeble, 
the complexion lighter, the step weaker, the laugh 
fainter. No more romping for that one through hall 
and parlor. The nursery is darkened by an approach- 
ing calamity. The heart feels with mournful antici- 
pation that the sun is going down. Night speeds on. 
It is toward evening, 

You have long rejoiced in the care of a mother. 
You have done everything to make her last days 
happy. You have run with quick feet to wait upon 
her every want. Her presence has been a perpetual 
blessing in the household. But the fruit-gatherers 
are looking wistfully at that tree. Her soul is ripe 
for heaven. The gates are ready to flash open for 
her entrance. But your soul sinks at the thought of 
separation. You can not bear to think that soon you 



230 



SUNSET. 



will be called to take the last look at that face, which 
from the first hour has looked upon you with affec- 
tion unchangeable. But you see that life is ebbing, 
and the grave will soon hide her from your sight. 
You sit quiet. You feel heavy-hearted. The light 
is fading from the sky, the air is chill. It is toward 
evening. 

You had a considerable estate and felt independent. 
In five minutes on one fair balance sheet you could 
see just how you stood with the world. But there 
came complications ; something that you imagined 
impossible, happened. The best friend you had 
proved traitor to your interest. A sudden crash of 
national misfortune prostrated your credit. You 
may to-day be going on in business, but you feel 
anxious about where you are standing, and fear that 
the next turn of the* commercial wheel will bring you 
prostrate, You foresee what you consider certain 
defalcation. You think of the anguish of telling 
your friends that you are not worth a dollar. You 
know not how you will ever bring your children 
home from school. You wonder how you will stand 
the selling of your library, or the moving into a 
plainer house. The misfortunes of life have accumu- 
lated. You wonder what makes the sky so dark. It 
is toward evening. 

Trouble is an apothecary that mixes a great many 
draughts, bitter, and sour and nauseous, and you 
must drink some one of them. Trouble puts up a 
great many packs, and you must carry some one of 
them. There is no sandal so thick and well adjusted 
but some thorn will strike through it. There is no 
sound so sweet but the undertaker's screw-driver 
grates through it. In this swift shuttle of the heart 



SUNSET. 



231 



some of the threads must break. The journey from 
Jerusalem to Emmaus will soon be ended. Our Bible, 
our common-sense, our observation reiterates in tones 
that we can not mistake, and ought not to disregard ; 
it is toward evening. 

Oh, then, for Jesus to abide with us ! He sweetens 
the cup. He extracts the thorn. He wipes the tear. 
He hushes the tempest. He soothes the soul that 
flies to Him for shelter. Let the night swoop and 
the euroclydon toss the sea. Let the thunders roar — 
soon all will be well. Christ in the ship to soothe 
His friends. Christ on the sea to stop its tumult. 
Christ in the grave to scatter the darkness. Christ 
in the heavens to lead the way. Blessed all such. 
His arms will inclose them. His grace comfort 
them. His light cheer them. His sacrifice free them. 
His glory enchant them. If earthly estate take 
wings, He will be an incorruptible treasure. If 
friends die, He will be their resurrection. Standing 
with us in the morning of your joy, and in the noon- 
day of our prosperity. He will not forsake us when 
the luster has faded, and it is toward evening. 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

THE FERRY BOAT OVER THE JORDAN. 

Every day I find people trying to extemporize a 
way from earth to heaven. They gather up their 
good works and some sentimental theories, and they 
make a raft, shoving it from this shore, and poor, 
deluded souls get on board that raft, and they go 
down. The fact is, that skepticism and infidelity 
never yet helped one man to die. I invite all the 
ship-carpenters of worldly philosophy to come and 
build one boat that can safely cross this river. I 
invite them all to unite their skill, and Bolingbroke 
shall lift the stanchions, and Carlyle shall set up the 
timber heads, and Tyndall shall lift the bowsprit, and 
Spinoza shall make the main-top gallant braces, and 
Renan shall go to tacking, and wearing, and boxing 
the ship. 

All together in ten thousand years they will never 
be able to make a boat that can cross this Jordan. 
Why was it that Spinoza and Blount and Shaftesbury 
lost their souls ? It was because they tried to cross 
the stream in a boat of their own construction. 
What miserable work they all made of dying! Dio- 
dorus died of mortification, because he could not 
guess a conundrum which had been proposed to him 
at a public dinner ; Zeuxis, the philosopher, died of 
mirth, laughing at a caricature of an aged woman — a 
caricature made by his own hand ; while another of 

232 



THE FERRY BOAT OVER THE JORDAN. 233 

their company and of their kind died saying, " Must 
I leave all these beautiful pictures?" and then asked 
that he might be bolstered up in the bed in his last 
moments, and be shaved and painted and rouged. 
Of all the unbelievers of all ages not one of them 
died well. Some of them sneaked out of life ; some 
of them wept themselves away into darkness ; some 
of them blasphemed and raved, and tore their bed- 
covers to tatters. That is the way worldly philo- 
sophy helps a man to die. 

When we cross over from this world to the next, 
the boat will have to come from the other side. I 
stand on the eastern side of the river Jordan, and I 
find no shipping at all ; but, while I am standing 
there, I see a 'boat plowing through the river, and as 
I hear the swirl of the waters, and the boat comes to 
the eastern side of the Jordan, and David and his 
family and his old friend step on board that boat, I 
am mightily impressed with the fact that, when we 
cross over from this world to the next, the boat will 
have to come from the opposite shore. 

Blessed be God, there is a boat coming from the 
other shore. Transportation at last for our souls 
from the other shore ; everything about this Gospel 
from the other shore ; pardon frcm the other shore ; 
mercy from the other shore ; rjity from the other 
shore; ministry of angels from the other shore; 
power to work miracles from the other shore ; Jesus 
Christ from the other shore. " This is a faithful 
saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ 
Jesus came into the world [a foreigner] to save 
sinners." I see the ferry-boat coming, and it rolls 
with the surges of a Saviour's suffering ; but as it 
Strikes the earth the mountains rock, and the dead 



234 THE FERRY BOAT OVER THE JORDAN. 

adjust their apparel so that they may be fit to come 
out. That boat touches the earth, and glorious 
Thomas Walsh gets into it, in his expiring moment, 
saying : " He has come ! He has come ! My Beloved 
is mine, and I am His." Good Sarah Wesley got 
into that boat, and as she shoved off from the shore 
she cried : " Open the gates ! open the gates ! " And 
the dying Christian soldier got into that boat. He 
was fatally wounded setting up the telegraph poles 
which had been torn down by the opposing army, 
and in his dying moments his Christian triumph and 
the feverish delirium seemed to mingle, and he 
cried out with exultation : " The wires are all laid ; 
the poles are all up from Stony Point to headquar- 
ters ! Huzzah ! " Oh, I bless God that as the boat 
came from the other shore to take David and his 
men across, so, when we come to die, the boat will 
come from the same direction, God forbid that I 
should ever trust to anything that starts from this 
side. 

Now, I want to break a delusion in your mind, and 
that is this. When our friends go out from this 
world, we feel sorry for them because they have to 
go alone, and parents hold on to the hands of their 
children who are dying, and hold on with something 
of the impression that the moment they let go the 
little one will be in the darkness and in the boat all 
alone. " Oh," the parent says, " if I could only go 
with my child, I would be willing to die half a dozen 
times. I am afraid she will be lost in the woods or 
in the darkness; I am afraid she will be very much 
frightened in the boat ah alone." I break up the 
delusion. When a soul goes to heaven it does not 
go alone ; the King is on board the boat. 



THE FERRY BOAT OVER THE JORDAN. 235 

Was Paul alone in the last exigency? Hear the 
shout of the scarred missionary as he cries out, " I 
am now ready to be offered, and the time of my de- 
parture is at hand." Was John Wesley alone in the 
last exigency ? No. Hear him say, " Best of all, 
God is with us." Was Sir William Forbes alone in 
the last exigency ? No. Hear him say to his friends, 
" Tell all the people who are coming down to the bed 
of death, from my experience has no terrors." "Oh," 
say a great many people, " that does very well for 
distinguished Christians ; but for me, a common man, 
for me, a common woman, we can't expect that guid- 
ance and help." If I should give you a passage of 
Scripture that would promise to you positively, when 
you are crossing the river to the next world, the King 
would be in the boat, would you believe the promise ? 
" Oh, yes," you say, " I would." Here is the promise : 
" When thou passest through the waters, I will be 
with thee ; and through the rivers, they shall not 
overflow thee." Christ at the sick .pillow to take the 
soul out of the body ; Christ to help the soul down 
the bank into the boat ; Christ mid stream ; Christ on 
the other side to help the soul up the beach. Be 
comforted about your departed friends. Be com- 
forted about your own demise when the time shall 
come. Tell it to all the people under the sun that 
no Christian ever dies alone ; the King is in the 
boat. 

leaving this world for heaven is only crossing a 
ferry. Dr. Shaw estimates the average width of the 
Jordan to be about thirty yards. What ! so narrow? 
Yes. Yes, going to heaven is only a short trip — only 
a ferry. It may be eighty miles, that is eighty years, 
before we get to the wet bank on the other side, and 



236 THE FERRY BOAT OVER THE JORDAN. 

we may travel millions of miles, that is millions of 
years, on the other side ; but the crossing is short. I 
will tell you the whole secret. It is not five minutes 
across, nor three, nor two, nor one minute. It is an 
instantaneous transportation. People talk as though 
leaving this life, the Christian went plunging, and 
floundering, and swimming, to crawl up exhausted 
on the other shore ; and to be pulled out of the pelt- 
ing surf as by a Ramsgate life boat. No such thing. 
It is only a ferry. It is so narrow that we can hail 
each other from bank to bank. It is only four arms' 
length across. The arm of earthly farewell put out 
from this side, the arm of heavenly welcome put out 
from the other side; while the dying Christian, stand- 
ing mid-stream, stretches out his two arms, the one 
to take the farewell of earth, and the other to take 
the greeting of heaven. That makes four arms' 
lengths across the river. 

Blessed be God, that when we leave this world we 
are not to have a great and perilous enterprise of 
getting into heaven. Not a dangerous Franklin ex- 
pedition, to find the Northwest passage among ice- 
bergs, Only a ferry. That accounts for something 
you have never been able to understand. You never 
supposed that very nervous and timid Christian peo- 
ple could be so perfectly unexcited and placid in the 
last hour. The fact is, they were clear down on the 
bank, and they saw there was nothing to be fright- 
ened about. Such a short distance — only a ferry. 
With one ear they heard the funeral psalm in their 
memory, and with the other ear they heard the song 
of heavenly salutation. The willows on this side the 
Jordan and the Lebanon cedars on the other almost 
interlocked their branches. Only a ferry. 



THE FERRY BOAT OVER THE JORDAN. 237 

When we cross over at the last, we shall find a 
solid landing. The ferry-boat means a place to start 
from and a place to land. David and his people did 
not find the eastern shore of the Jordan any more 
solid than the western shore where he landed, and yet 
to a great many heaven is not a real place. To you 
heaven ■ is a fog-bank in the distance. Now my 
heaven is a solid heaven. After the resurrection has 
come you will have a resurrected foot, and some- 
thing to tread on ; and a resurrected eye, and colors 
to see with it ; and a resurrected ear, and music to 
regale it. Smart men in this day are making a great 
deal of fun about St. John's materialistic descriptions 
of heaven. Well now, my friends, if you will tell me 
what will be the use of a resurrected body in heaven 
with nothing to tread on, and nothing to hear, and 
nothing to handle, and nothing to taste, then I will 
laugh too. Are you going to float about in ether for- 
ever, swinging about your hands and feet through 
the air indiscriminately, and one moment sweltering in 
the center of the sun, and the next moment shivering 
in the mountains of the moon ? That is not my 
heaven. 

Dissatisfied with John's materialistic heaven, theo- 
logical thinkers are trying to patch up a heaven that 
will do for them at the last. I never heard of any 
heaven I want to go to, except St. John's heaven. I 
believe I shall hear Mr. Toplady sing yet, and Isaac 
Watts recite hymns, and Mozart play. Oh," you 
say, " where would you get the organ ? " The Lord 
will provide the organ. Don't you bother about the 
organ. I believe I shall yet see David with a harp, 
and I will ask him to sing one of the songs of Zion. I 
believe after the resurrection I shall see Masillon, the 



238 THE FERRY BOAT OVER THE JORDAN. 

great French pulpit orator, and I shall hear from his 
own lips how he felt on that day when he preached 
the king's funeral sermon, and flung his whole audi- 
ence into a paroxysm of grief and solemnity. I have 
no patience with your transcendental gelatinous gase- 
ous heaven. My heaven is not a fog-bank. My eyes 
are unto the hills, the everlasting hills. The King's 
ferry-boat, starting from a wharf on this side, will go 
to a wharf on the other side. 

Our arrival will not be like stepping ashore at Ant- 
werp or Constantinople, among a crowd of strangers ; 
it will be among friends, good friends, warm-hearted 
friends, and all their friends. 

We know people whom we have never seen, by 
hearing somebody talk about them very much; we 
know them almost as well as if we had seen them. 
And do you not suppose that our parents and 
brothers and sisters and children in heaven have 
been talking about us all these years, and talking to 
their friends ? so that, I suppose, when we cross the 
river at the last, we shall not only be met by all those 
Christian friends whom we knew on earth, but by all 
their friends. They will come down to the landing 
to meet us. Your departed friends love you more 
now than they ever did. You will be surprised at 
the last to find how they know about all the affairs 
of your life. Why, they are only across the ferry ; 
and the boat is coming this way, and the boat is 
going that way. I do not know but that they have 
already asked the Lord the day, the hour, the 
moment, when you are coming across, and that they 
know now ; but I do know you will be met at the 
landing. The poet Southey said he thought he 
should know Bishop Heber in heaven by the por- 



THE FERRY BOAT OVER THE JORDAN. 239 

traits he had seen of him in London ; and Dr. Ran- 
dolph said he thought he would know William 
Cowper, the poet, in heaven, from the pictures he had 
seen of him in England ; but we will know our 
departed kindred by the portraits hung in the throne- 
room of our hearts. 

On starlight nights you look up — and I suppose it 
is so with any one who has friends in heaven — on 
starlight nights you look up, and you cannot help 
but think of those who have gone ; and I suppose 
they look down, and cannot but think of us. But 
they have the advantage of us. We know not just 
where their world of joy is ; they know where we 
are. 

There was romance as well as Christian beauty in 
the .life of Dr. Adoniram Judson, the Baptist mis- 
sionary, when he concluded to part from his wife, 
she to come to America to restore her health, he to 
go back to Burmah to preach the Gospel. They had 
started from Burmah for the United States together, 
but, getting near St. Helena, Mrs. Judson was so 
much better she said : " Well, now, I can get home 
very easily ; you go back to Burmah and preach the 
Gospel to those poor people. I am almost well ; I 
shall soon be well, and then I will return to you." 
After she had made that resolution, terrific in its 
grief, willing to give up her husband for Christ's 
sake, she sat down in her room, and with her trem- 
bling hand wrote some eight or ten verses, two or 
three of which I will give you : 

" We part on this green islet, love; 
Thou for the eastern main ; 
I for the setting sun, love: 
Oh, when to meet again ! 



240 THE FERRY BOAT OVER THE JORDAN. 



" When we knelt to see our Henry die, 
And heard his last faint moan, 
Each wiped away the other's tears ; 
Now each must weep alone. 

" And who can paint our mutual joy 
When, all our wandering o'er, 
We both shall clasp our infants three, 
At home on Burmah's shore? 

" But higher shall our raptures glow 
On yon celestial plain, 
When the loved and parted here below 
Meet ne'er to part again." 

She folded that manuscript ; a relapse of her disease 
came on, and she died. Dr. Judson says he put. her 
away, for the resurrection, on the Isle of St. Helena. 
They had thought to part for a year or two ; now 
they parted forever, so far as this world is concerned. 
And he says he hastened on board after the funeral 
with his little children to start for Burmah, for the 
vessel had already lifted her sails ; and he said : " I 
sat down for some time in my cabin, my little chil- 
dren around me crying, ' Mother, mother ! ' and I 
abandoned myself to heart-breaking grief. But one 
day the thought came across me, as my faith 
stretched her wing, that we should meet in heaven, 
and I was comforted." 

Was it, my friends, all a delusion? When he died, 
did she meet him at the landing ? When she died, 
did the scores of souls whom she had brought to 
Christ, and who had preceded her to heaven, meet 
her at the landing? I believe it; I know it. Oh, 
glorious consolation, that when our poor work on 
earth is done and we cross the river, we shall be met 
at the landing. 



PART II. 



Coal0 for* tge Church IVJilitaqt. 




CHAPTER XXIV. 



DOWNFALL OF CHRISTIANITY. 

Christianity is the rising sun of our time, and men 
have tried with the uprolling vapors of skepticism and 
the smoke of their blasphemy to turn the sun into 
darkness. Suppose the archangels of malice and 
horror should be let loose a little while and be 
allowed to extinguish and destroy the sun in the nat- 
ural heavens. They would take the oceans from 
other worlds and pour them on this luminary of the 
planetary system, and the waters go hissing down 
amid the ravines and the caverns, and there is explo- 
sion after explosion, until there are only a few peaks 
of fire left in the sun, and these are cooling down and 
going out until the vast continents of flame are re- 
duced to a small acreage of fire, and that whitens 
and cools off until there are only a few coals left, and 
these are whitening and going out until there is not 
a spark left in all the mountains of ashes and the val- 
leys of ashes and the chasms of ashes. An extin- 
guished sun. A dead sun. A buried sun. Let all 
worlds wail at the stupendous obsequies. Of course, 
this withdrawal of the solar light and heat throws 
our earth into a universal chill, and the tropics be- 
come the temperate, and the temperate becomes the 
Arctic, and there are frozen rivers and frozen lakes 
and frozen oceans. From the Arctic and Antarctic 
regions the inhabitants gather in toward the center 

243 



244 DOWNFALL OF CHRISTIANITY. 

and find the equator as the poles. The slain forests 
are piled up into a great bonfire, and around them 
gather the shivering villages and cities. The wealth 
of the coal mines is hastily poured into the furnaces 
and stirred into rage of combustion, but soon the 
bonfires begin to lower, and the furnaces begin to go 
out, and the nations begin to die. Cotopaxi, Vesu- 
vius, Etna, Stromboli, Californian geysers cease to 
smoke, and the ice of hailstorms remains unmelted 
in their crater. All the flowers have breathed their 
last breath. Ships with sailors frozen at the mast and 
helmsmen frozen at the wheel, and passengers frozen 
in the cabin. 

All nations dying, first at the north and then at the 
south. Child frosted and dead in the cradle. Oc- 
togenarian frosted and dead at the hearth. Work- 
men with frozen hand on the hammer and frozen foot 
on the shuttle. Winter from sea to sea. All-con- 
gealing winter. Perpetual winter. Globe of frigidity. 
Hemisphere shackled to hemisphere by chains of ice. 
Universal Nova Zembla. The earth an ice-floe grind- 
ing against other ice-floes. The archangels of malice 
and horror have done their work, and now they may 
take their thrones of glacier, and look down on the 
ruin they have wrought. 

What the destruction of the sun in the natural 
heavens would be to our physical earth, the destruc- 
tion of Christianity would be to the moral world. 
The sun turned into darkness. Infidelity in our time 
is considered a great joke. There are people who 
will gather to hear Christianity caricatured, and to 
hear Christ assailed with quibble, and quirk, and 
misrepresentation, and badinage, and harlequinade. 

I propose to take Infidelity and Atheism out of the 



DOWNFALL OF CHRISTIANITY. 245 

realms of jocularity into one of tragedy, and show 
you what these men propose, and what, if they are 
successful, they will accomplish. There are those in 
all our communities who would like to see the Chris- 
tian religion overthrown, and who say the world 
would be better without it. I want to show you 
what is the end of this road, and what is the terminus 
of this crusade, and what this world would be when 
Atheism and Infidelity have triumphed over it, if 
they can. I say, if they can. I reiterate it, if they 
can. 

In the first place, it will be the complete and unut- 
terable degradation of womanhood. 

I will prove it by facts and arguments which no 
honest man will dispute. In all communities, and 
cities, and states, and nations, where the Christian re- 
ligion has been dominant, woman's condition has been 
ameliorated and improved, and she is deferred to and 
honored in a thousand things, and every gentleman 
takes off his hat before her. If your associations 
have been good, you know that the name of wife, 
mother, daughter, suggest gracious surroundings. 

Now, compare this with woman's condition in 
lands where Christianity has made little or no ad- 
vance — in China, in Barbary, in Borneo, in Tartary, 
in Egypt, in Hindostan. The Burmese sell their 
wives and daughters as so many sheep. The Hindoo 
Bible makes it disgraceful and an outrage for a 
woman to listen to music, or look out of the window 
in the absence of her husband, and gives as a lawful 
ground for divorce, a woman's beginning to eat 
before her husband has finished his meal. What 
mean those white bundles on the ponds and rivers in 
China in the morning ? Infanticide following infant- 



246 DOWNFALL OF CHRISTIANITY. 

icide. Female children destroyed, simply because 
they are female. Women harnessed to a plow as an 
ox. Women veiled and barricaded, and in all styles 
of cruel seclusion. Her birth a misfortune. Her 
life a torture. Her death a horror. The missionary 
of the cross to-day, in heathen lands, preaches gen- 
erally to two groups — a group of men who do as 
they please, and sit where they please ; the other 
group women, hidden and carefully secluded in a 
side apartment, where they may hear the voice of 
the preacher, but may not be seen. No refinement. 
No liberty. No hope for this life. No hope for the 
life to come. Ringed nose. Cramoed foot. Dis- 
figured face. Embruted soul. 

Now, compare those two conditions. How far 
toward this latter condition would woman go if 
Christian influences were withdrawn, and Christi- 
anity were destroyed? It is only a question of 
dynamics. 

If an object be lifted to a certain point and not 
fastened there, and the lifting power be withdrawn, 
how long before that object will fall down to the 
point from which it started ? It will fall down, and 
it will go still further than the point from which it 
started. Christianity has lifted women up from the 
very depths of degradation almost to the skies. If 
that lifting power be withdrawn, she falls clear back 
to the depth from which she was resurrected, not 
going any lower, because there is no lower depth. 

If infidelity triumph, and Christianity be over- 
thrown, it means the demoralization of society. The 
one idea in the Bible that atheists and infidels most 
hate, is the idea of retribution. Take away the idea 
of retribution and punishment from society, and it 



DOWNFALL OF CHRISTIANITY. 247 

will begin very soon to disintegrate ; and take away 
from the minds of men the fear of hell, and there are 
a great many of them who would very soon turn 
this world into a hell. 

The majority of those who are indignant against 
the Bible because of the idea of a punishment are 
men whose lives are bad or whose hearts are impure, 
and who hate the Bible because of the idea of future 
punishment for the same reason that criminals hate 
the penitentiary. Oh, I have heard this brave talk 
about people fearing nothing of the consequences of 
sin in the next world, and I have made up my mind 
it is merely a coward's whistling to keep his courage 
up. I have seen men flaunt their immoralities in the 
face of the community, and I have heard them defy 
the Judgment Day and scoff at the idea of any future 
consequence of their sin ; but when they came to die 
they shrieked until you could hear them for nearly 
two blocks, and in the summer night the neighbors 
got up to put the windows down because they could 
not endure the horror. 

I would not want to see a railroad train with five 
hundred Christian people on board go down through 
a drawbridge into a watery grave. I would not 
want to see five hundred Christian people go into 
such disaster, but I tell you plainly that I could more 
easily see that than I could for any protracted time 
stand and see an infidel die, though his pillow were 
of eider-down and under a canopy of vermilion. I. 
have never been* able to brace up my nerves for such 
a spectacle. There is something at such a time so 
indescribable in the countenance. I just looked in 
upon it for a minute or two, but the clutch of his fist 
was so diabolic, and the strength, of his voice was so 



248 DOWNFALL OF CHRISTIANITY. 

unnatural, I could not endure it. " There is no hell, 
there is no hell, there is no hell ! " the man had said 
for sixty years; but that night when I looked into 
the dying room of my infidel neighbor, there was 
something on his countenance which seemed to say, 
" There is, there is, there is, there is! " 

The mightiest restraints to-day against theft, against 
immorality, against libertinism, against crime of alL 
sorts — the mightiest restraints are the retributions of 
eternity. Men know that they can escape the law, 
but down in the offender's soul there is the realization 
of the fact that they cannot escape God. He stands 
at the end of the road of profligacy, and He will not 
clear the guilty. Take all idea of retribution and 
punishment out of the hearts and minds of men, and 
it would not be long before Brooklyn and New York 
and Boston and Charleston and Chicago became 
Sodoms. The only restraints against the evil pas- 
sions of the world to-day are Bible restraints. 

Suppose now these generals of Atheism and Infidel- 
ity got the victory, and suppose they marshalled a 
great army made up of the majority of the world. 
They are in companies, in regiments, in brigades — 
the whole army. Forward, march! ye host of infidels 
and atheists, banners flying before, banners flying be- 
hind, banners inscribed with the words : " No God ! 
No Christ ! No punishment ! No restraints ! Down 
with the Bible ! Do as you please !" The sun turned 
into darkness. Forward, march ! ye great army of 
infidels and atheists. And first of all you will attack 
the churches. Away with those houses of worship! 
They have been standing there so long deluding the 
people with consolation in their bereavements and 
sorrows. All those churches ought to be extirpated ; 



DOWNFALL OF CHRISTIANITY. 249 



they have done so much to relieve the lost and bring 
home the wandering, and they have so long held up 
the idea of eternal rest after the paroxysm of this life 
is over. Turn the St. Peters and St. Pauls and the 
temples and tabernacles into club-houses. Away 
with those churches ! 

Forward, march ! ye great army of infidels and 
atheists, and next of all they scatter the Sabbath- 
schools ; the Sabbath-schools filled with bright-eyed, 
bright-cheeked little ones who are singing songs on 
Sunday afternoon, and getting instruction when they 
ought to be on the street corners playing marbles, or 
swearing on the commons. Away with them ! For- 
ward, march ! ye great army of infidels and atheists, 
and next of all they will attack Christian asylums — the 
institutions of mercy supported by Christian philan- 
thropies. Never mind the blind eyes and the deaf ears 
and the crippled limbs and the weakened intellects. 
Let paralyzed old age pick up its own food, and 
orphans fight their own way, and the half reformed 
go back to their evil habits. Forward, march! ye 
great army of infidels and atheists, and with your 
battle-axes hew down the cross and split up the 
manger of Bethlehem. Civilization hurled back into 
semi-barbarism, and semi-barbarism driven back into 
Hottentot savagery. The wheel of progress turned 
the other way, and turned toward the dark ages. 
The clock of the centuries put back two thousand 
years. Go back, you Sandwich Islands, from your 
schools and from your colleges and from your re- 
formed condition to what you were in 1820, when 
the missionaries first came. Call home the five hun- 
dred missionaries from India and overthrow their 
two thousand schools, where they are trying to edu- 



250 DOWNFALL OF CHRISTIANITY. 

cate the heathen, and scatter the one hundred and 
forty thousand little children that they have gathered 
out of barbarism into civilization. Obliterate all the 
work of Dr. Duff in India, of David Abeel in China, 
of Dr. King in Greece, of Judson in Burmah, of 
David Brainard amid the American aborigines, and 
send home the three thousand missionaries of the 
cross who are -toiling in foreign lands, toiling for 
Christ's sake, toiling themselves into the grave. Tell 
these three thousand men of God that they are of no 
use. Send home the medical missionaries who are 
doctoring the bodies as well as the souls of the dying 
nations. Go home, London Missionary Society. 
Go home, American Board of Foreign Missions. 
Go home, ye Moravians, and relinquish back into 
darkness and squalor and filth and death the nations 
whom ye have begun to lift. 

A thousand voices come up to me saying : " Do 
you really think Infidelity will succeed? Has 
Christianity received its death-blow ? and will the 
Bible become obsolete ? " Yes, when the smoke 
of the city chimney arrests and destroys the noon- 
day sun. Josephus says about the time of the 
destruction of Jerusalem the sun was turned into 
darkness; but only the clouds rolled between the 
sun and the earth; The sun went right on. It is 
the same sun, the same luminary as when at the 
beginning it shot out like an electric spark from 
God's finger, and to-day it is warming the nations, 
and to-day it is gilding the sea, and to-day it is filling 
the earth with light. The same old. sun, not at all 
worn out, though its light steps one hundred and 
ninety million miles a second, though its pulsations 
are four hundred and fifty trillion undulations in a 



DOWNFALL OF CHRISTIANITY. 2$l 

second. Same sun with beautiful white light made 
up of the violet and the indigo and the blue and the 
green and the red and the yellow and the orange — 
the seven beautiful colors now just as when the solar 
spectrum first divided them. 

At the beginning God said : " Let there be light," 
and light was, and light is, and light shall be. So 
Christianity is rolling on, and it is going to warm all 
nations, and all nations are to bask in its light. Men 
may shut the window blinds so they cannot see it, or 
they may smoke the pipe of speculation until they 
are shadowed under their own" vaporing ; but the 
Lord God is a sun ! This white light of the Gospel 
made up of all the beautiful colors of earth and 
heaven — violet plucked from amid the spring grass, 
and the indigo of the Southern jungles, and the blue 
of the skies, and the green of the foliage, and the 
yellow of the autumnal woods, and the orange of the 
Southern groves, and the red of the sunsets. All the 
beauties of earth and heaven brought out by this 
spiritual spectrum. Great Britain is going to take 
all Europe for God. The United States are going to 
take all America for God. Both of them together 
will take all Asia for God. All three of them will take 
Africa for God. " Who art thou, oh great mountain? 
before Zerubbabel thou shalt become a plain." The 
mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. Hallelujah, 
amen ! 



CHAPTER XXV. 



EVOLUTION. 

There is no contest between genuine science and 
revelation. The same God who, by the hand of 
prophet wrote on parchment, by the hand of the storm 
wrote on the rock. The best telescopes and micro- 
scopes and electric batteries and philosophical appa- 
ratus belong to Christian universities. Who gave us 
magnetic telegraphy ? Professor Morse, a Christian. 
Who swung the lightnings under the sea, cabling the 
continents together? Cyrus W. Field, the Christian. 
Who discovered the anassthetical properties of chlo- 
roform, doing more for the relief of human pain than 
any man that ever lived, driving back nine-tenths of 
the horrors of surgery? James Y. Simpson, of Edin- 
burgh, as eminent for piety as for science ; oh week 
days in the university lecturing on profoundest scien- 
tific subjects, and on Sabbaths preaching the Gospel 
of Jesus Christ to the masses of Edinburgh. I saw 
the universities of that city draped in mourning for 
his death, and I heard his eulogy pronounced by the 
destitute populations of the Cowgate. Science and 
revelation are the bass and the soprano of the same 
tune. The whole world will yet acknowledge the 
complete harmony. But between science falsely so 
called and revelation, there is an uncompromising 
war, and one or the other must go under. And 
when I say scientists, of course, I do not mean liter- 

252 



* 



EVOLUTION 



253 



ary men or theologians who in essay or in sermon, 
and without giving their life to scientific investiga- 
tion look at the subject on this side or that. By sci- 
entists I mean those who have a specialty in that 
direction, and who, through zoological garden and 
aquarium and astronomical observatory, give their 
life to the study of the physical earth, its plants and 
its animals, and the regions beyond so far as optical 
instruments have explored them. 

I put upon the witness stand, living and dead, the 
leading evolutionists — Ernst Heckel, John Stuart 
Mill, Huxley, Tyndall, Darwin, Spencer. On the 
witness stand, ye men of science, living and dead, 
answer these questions : Do you believe the Holy 
Scriptures ? No. And so they say all. Do you be- 
lieve the Bible story of Adam and Eve in the Gar- 
den of Eden ? No. And so they say all. Do you 
believe the miracles of the Old and New Testament ? 
No. And so they say all. Do you believe that Jesus 
Christ died to save the nations ? No. And so they 
say all. Do you believe in the regenerating power 
of the Holy Ghost ? No. And so they say all. Do 
you believe that human supplication directed heaven- 
ward ever makes any difference ? No. And so they 
say all. 

Herbert Spencer, in the only address he made in 
this country, in his very first sentence ascribes his 
physical ailments to fate, and the authorized report of 
that address begins the word fate with a big "F." 
Professor Heckel, in the very first page of his two 
great volumes sneers at the Bible as a so-called reve- 
lation. Tyndall, in his famous prayer test, defied the 
whole of Christendom to show that human supplica- 
tion made any difference in the result of things. 



254 EVOLUTION. 

John Stuart Mill wrote elaborately against Christian- 
ity, and to show that his rejection of it was complete, 
ordered this epitaph for his tombstone : "Most un- 
happy." Huxley said that at the first reading of 
Darwin's book he was convinced of the fact that 
teleology, by which he means Christianity, had re- 
ceived its death-blow at the hand of Mr. Darwin. All 
the leading scientists who believe in evolution, with- 
out one exception the world over, are infidel. I say 
nothing against infidelity, mind you ; I only wish to 
define the belief and the meaning of the rejection. 

Now, I put opposite to each other, to show that 
evolution is infidelity, the Bible account of how the 
human race started, and the evolutionist account as 
to how the human race started. Bible account : 
" God said, let us make man in our image. God 
created man in his own image ; male and female 
created He them." He breathed into him the breath 
of life, the whole story setting forth the idea that it 
was not a perfect kangaroo, or a perfect orang outang, 
but a perfect man. That is the Bible account. The 
evolutionist account: Away back in the ages there 
were four or five primal germs, or seminal spores 
from which all the living creatures have been evolved. 
Go away back, and there you will find a vegetable 
stuff that might be called a mushroom. This mush- 
room by innate force develops a tadpole, the tadpole 
by innate force develops a polywog, the poly wog de- 
velops a fish, the fish by natural force develops into a 
reptile, the reptile develops into a quadruped, the 
quadruped develops into a baboon, the baboon de- 
velops into a man." 

Darwin says that the human hand is only a fish's 
fin developed. He says that the human lungs are 



EVOLUTION. 



255 



only a swim bladder showing that we once floated or 
were amphibious. He says the human ear could 
once have been moved by force of will just as a horse 
lifts its ear at a frightful object. He says the human 
race were originally web-footed. From primal germ 
to tadpole, from tadpole to fish, from fish to reptile, 
from reptile to wolf, from wolf to chimpanzee, and 
from chimpanzee to man. Now, if anybody says that 
the Bible account of the starting of the human race 
and the evolutionist account of the starting of the 
human race are the same accounts, he makes an ap- 
palling misrepresentation. 

Prefer, if you will, Darwin's " Origin of the 
Species " to the book of Genesis, but know you are 
an infidel. As for myself, as Herbert Spencer was 
not present at the creation and the Lord Almighty 
was present, I prefer to take the divine account as to 
what really occurred on that occasion. To show that 
this evolution is only an attempt to eject God, and 
to postpone Him and to put Him clear out of reach, 
I ask a question or two. The baboon made the man, 
and the wolf made the baboon, and the reptile made 
the quadruped, and the fish made the reptile, and 
the tadpole made the fish, and the primal germ made 
the tadpole. Who mad*e the primal germ ? Most of 
the evolutionists say : " We don't know." Others 
say it made itself. Others say it was spontaneous 
generation. There is not one of them who will fairly 
and openly, and frankly and emphatically say, " God 
made it." t 

The nearest to a direct answer is that made by 
Herbert Spencer, in which he says it was made by 
the great " unknowable mystery." But here comes 
Huxley with a pail of protoplasm to explain the 



256 EVOLUTION. 

thing. This protoplasm, he says, is primal life giving 
quality with which the race away back in the ages 
was started. With this protoplasm he proposes to 
explain everything. Dear Mr. Huxley, who made 
the protoplasm ? 

To show you that evolution is infidel, I place the 
Bible account of how the brute creation was started 
opposite to the evolutionist's account of the way the 
brute creation was started. Bible account : You 
know the Bible tells how that the birds were made at 
one time, and the cattle made at another time, and 
the fish made at another time, and that each brought 
forth after its kind. Evolutionist account : From 
four or five primal germs or seminal spores all the 
living creatures evolved. Hundreds of thousands of 
species of insects, of reptiles, of beasts, of fish, from 
four germs — a statement flatly contradicting, not only 
the Bible, but the very A B C of science. A species 
never develops into anything but its own species. In 
all the ages, and in all the world there has never 
been an exception to it. The shark never comes of a 
whale, nor the pigeon of a vulture, nor the butterfly 
of a wasp. Species never cross over. If there be an 
attempt at it, it is hybrid and hybrid is always sterile 
and has no descendants. 

Agassiz says that he found in a reef of Florida, the 
remains of insects thirty thousand years old — not 
three, but thirty thousand years old — and that they 
were just like the insects now. There has been no 
change. All the facts of ornithology and zoology, 
and ichthyology and conchology, but an echo of 
Genesis first, and twenty-first ; " Every winged fowl 
after his kind." Every creature after its kind. When 
common observation and science corroborate the 



EVOLUTION. 



257 



Bible I will not stultify myself by surrendering to the 
elaborated guesses of evolutionists. 

To show that evolution is infidel I place also the 
Bible account of how worlds were made opposite the 
evolutionists' account of how worlds were made. 
Bible account : God made two great lights — the one 
to rule the day, the other to rule the night ; He made 
the stars also. Evolutionist account : Away back 
in the ages, there was a fire mist, or star dust, and 
this fire mist cooled off into granite, and then this 
granite by earthquake and by storm, and by light, 
was shaped into mountains, and valleys, and seas, and 
so what was originally fire mist, became what we call 
the earth. \ 

Who made the fire mist? Who set the fire mist to 
world making? Who cooled off the fire mist into 
granite? You have pushed God some sixty or 
seventy million miles from the earth, but He is too 
near yet for the health of evolution. For a great 
while the evolutionists boasted that they had found 
the very stuff out of which this world and all worlds 
were made. They lifted the telescope and they saw 
it, the very material out of which worlds made them- 
selves. Nebula of simple gas. They laughed in tri- 
umph because they had found the factory where the 
worlds were manufactured, and there was no God 
anywhere around the factory ! But in an unlucky 
hour for infidel evolutionists the spectroscope of 
Fraunhofer and Kirchoff were invented, by which 
they saw into that nebula, and found it was not a 
simple gas, but was a compound, and hence had to 
be supplied from some other source, and that implied 
a God, and away went their theory, shattered into 
everlasting demolition. 

!7 



258 



EVOLUTION. 



So these infidel evolutionists go wandering up and 
down guessing through the universe. Anything to 
push back the Jehovah from His empire and make 
the one book which is His great communication to 
the soul of the human race, appear obselete and a de- 
rision. But I am glad to know that while some of 
these scientists have gone into evolution, there are 
more that do not believe it. Among them, the man 
who by most is considered the greatest scientist we 
ever had this side the water — Agassiz. A name 
that makes every intelligent man the earth over 
uncover. 

Agassiz says : " The manner in which the evolution 
theory in zoology is treated would lead those who 
are not special zoologists to suppose that observations 
have been made by which it can be inferred that 
there is in nature such a thing as change among 
organized beings actually taking place. There is no 
such thing on record. It is shifting the ground of 
observation from one field of observation to another 
to make this statement, and when the assertions go 
so far as to exclude from the domain of science those 
who will not be dragged into this mire of mere asser- 
tion, then it is time to protest." 

With equal vehemence against this doctrine of evo- 
lution Hugh Miller, Farraday, Brewster, Dana, Daw- 
son, and hundreds of scientists in this country and 
other countries have made protest. I know that the 
few men who have adopted the theory make more 
noise than the thousands who have rejected it. The 
Bothnia of the Cunard Line took five hundred pas- 
sengers safely from New York to Liverpool.' Not 
one of the five hundred made any excitement. But 
after we had been four days out, one morning we 



EVOLUTION. 259 

found on deck a man's hat and coat and vest and 
boots, implying that some one had jumped overboard. 
Forthwith we all began to talk about that one man. 
There was more talk about that one man overboard 
than all the five hundred passengers that rode on in 
safety. "Why did he jump overboard?" "I won- 
der when he jumped overboard?" "I wonder if 
when he jumped overboard he would like to have 
jumped back again?" "I wonder if a fish caught 
him, or whether he went clear down to the bottom of 
the sea?" And for three or four days afterward we 
talked about that poor man. 

Here is the glorious and magnificent theory that 
God by His omnipotent power made man, and by 
His omnipotent power made the brute creation, and 
by His omnipotent power made all worlds, and five 
thousand scientists have taken passage on board that 
magnificent theory, but ten or fifteen have jumped 
overboard. They make more talk than all the five 
thousand that did not jump. I am politely asked to 
jump with them. Thank you, gentlemen, I am very 
much obliged to you. I think I shall stick to the old 
Cunarder. If you want to jump overboard, jump, 
and test for yourselves whether your hand was really 
a fish's fin, and whether you were web-footed origi- 
nally, and whether your lungs are a swim bladder. 
And as in every experiment there must be a division 
of labor, some who experiment and some who observe, 
you make the experiment, and I will observe. 

There is one tenet of evolution which it is de- 
manded we adopt, that which Darwin calls "Natural 
Selection," and that which W T allace calls the "Sur- 
vival of the Fittest." By this they mean that the 
human race and the brute creation are all the time 



1 



26o 



EVOLUTION. 



improving, because the weak die and the strong live. 
Those who do not die survive because they are the 
fittest. They say the breed of sheep and cattle, and 
dogs, and men, is all the time improving, naturally 
improving. No need of God, or any Bible, or any 
religion, but just natural progress. 

You see the race started with " spontaneous gene- 
ration," and then it goes right on until Darwin can 
take us up with his " natural selection," and Wallace 
can take us up with his " survival of the fittest," and 
so we go right on up forever. Beautiful ! But do 
the fittest survive? Garfield dead in September — 
Guiteau surviving until the following June. " Survi- 
val of the fittest?" Ah ! no. The martyrs, religious and 
political, dying for their principles, their bloody per- 
secutors living on to old age. " Survival of the fit- 
test ? " Five hundred thousand brave Northern men 
marching out to meet five hundred thousand brave 
Southern men, and die on the battlefield for a prin- 
ciple. Hundreds of thousands of them went down 
into the grave trenches. We staid at home in com- 
fortable quarters. Did they die because they were 
not as fit to live as we who survived ? Ah ! no ; not 
the "survival of the fittest." Ellsworth and Nathaniel 
Lyon falling on the Northern side. Albert Sidney 
Johnston and Stonewall Jackson falling on the South- 
ern side. Did they fall because they were not as fit 
to live as the soldiers and the generals who came 
back in safety ? No. Bitten with the frosts of the 
second death be the tongue that dares utter it ! It is 
not the " survival of the fittest." 

How has it been in the families of the world ? How 
was it with the child physically the strongest, intel- 
lectually the brightest, in disposition the kindest? 



EVOLUTION. 



26l 



Did that child die because it was not as fit to live as 
those of your family that survived ? Not the " sur- 
vival of the fittest." In all communities some of the 
noblest, grandest men dying in youth, or in mid-life, 
while some of the meanest and most contemptible live 
on to old age. Not the " survival of the fittest." 

But to show you that this doctrine is antagonistic to 
the Bible and to common sense, I have only to prove 
to you that there has been no natural progress. Vast 
improvement from another source, but mind you, no 
natural progress. Where is the fine horse in any of 
our parks whose picture of eye and mane, and nostril 
and neck, and haunches is worthy of being compared 
to Job's picture of a horse as he thousands of years ago 
heard it paw, and neigh and champ its bit for the 
battle ? Pigeons of to-day not so wise as the carrier 
pigeons of five hundred years ago — pigeons that car- 
ried the mails from army to army and from city to 
city ; one of them flung into the sky at Rome or 
Venice landing without ship or rail train in London. 

And as to the human race, so far as mere natural 
progress is concerned, it started with men ten feet 
high ; now the average is about five feet six inches. 
It started with men living two hundred, four hun- 
dred, eight hundred, nine hundred years, and now 
thirty years is more than the average of human life. 
Mighty progress we have made, haven't we ? I went 
into the cathedral at York, England, and the best 
artists in England had just been painting a window 
in that cathedral, and right beside it was a window 
painted four hundred years ago, and there is not a 
man on earth but would say that the modern paint- 
ing of the window by the best artists of England is 
not worthy of being compared with the painting of 



262 



EVOLUTION. 



four hundred years ago right beside it. Vast im- 
provement, as I shall show you in a minute or two, 
but no natural evolution. 

I tell you, my friends, that natural evolution is not 
upward, but it is always downward. Hear Christ's 
account of it. Fifteenth Matthew, and nineteenth 
verse: Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, 
murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness,, 
blasphemies." That is what Christ said of Evolution. 
Give natural evolution full swing in our world and 
it will evolve into two hemispheres of crime, two 
hemispheres of penitentiary, two hemispheres of 
lazaretto, two hemispheres of brothel. New York 
Tombs, Moyamensing Prison, Philadelphia ; Seven 
Dials, London, and Cowgate, Edinburgh, only fester- 
ing carbuncles on the face and neck of natural evolu- 
tion. See what the Bible says about the heart, and 
then what evolution says about the heart. Evolution 
says, "Better and better and better gets the heart by 
natural improvement." The Bible says : " The heart 
is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked." 
Who can know it? When you can evolve fragrance 
from malodor, and Can evolve an oratorio from a 
buzz-saw, and can evolve fall pippins from a basket 
of decayed crab apples, then you can by natural evo- 
lution from the human heart develop goodness. Ah ! 
my friends, evolution is always downward ; it is never 
upward. 

What is remarkable about this thing is, it is all the 
time developing its dishonesty. In our day it is 
ascribing this evolution to Herbert Spencer and 
Charles Darwin. It is a dishonesty. Evolution was 
known and advocated hundreds of years before these 
gentlemen began to be evolved. The Phoenicians, 



EVOLUTION. 



263 



thousands of years ago, declared that the human race 
wobbled out of the mud. Democritus, who lived 
460 years before Christ — remember that — knew this 
doctrine of evolution, when he said : " Everything 
is composed of atoms, or infinitely small elements, 
each with a definite quality, form and movement, 
whose inevitable union and separation, shape all dif- 
ferent things and forms, laws and efforts, and dissolve 
them again for new combinations. The gods them- 
selves and the human mind originated from such 
atoms. There are no casualties. Everything is neces- 
sary and determined by the nature of the atoms which 
have certain mutual affinities, attractions, and repul. 
sions." Anoximander, centuries ago, declares that 
the human race started at the place where the sea 
saturated the earth. Lucretius develops long cen- 
turies ago, in his poems, the doctrine of evolution. 

It is an old heathen corpse set up in a morgue. 
Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer are trying to 
galvanize it. They drag this old putrefaction of three 
thousand years around the earth, boasting that it is their 
originality, and so wonderful is the infatuation that 
at the Delmonico dinner given in honor of Herbert 
Spencer there were those who ascribed to him this 
great originality of evolution. There the banqueters 
sat around the table in honor of Herbert Spencer, 
chewing beef and turkey and roast pig, which, ac- 
cording to their doctrine of evolution, made them 
eating their own relations ! 

There is only one thing worse than English snobbery, 
and that is American snobbery. I like democracy 
and I like aristocracy ; but there is one kind of ocracy 
in this country that excites my contempt, and that is 
what Charles Kingsley, after he had witnessed it 



264 



EVOLUTION. 



himself, called snobocracy. Now I say it is a gigan- 
tic dishonesty when they ascribe this old heathen 
doctrine of evolution to any modern gentleman. 
I am not a pessimist but an optimist. I do not be- 
lieve everything is going to destruction ; I believe 
everything is going on to redemption. But it will 
not be through the infidel doctrine of evolution, but 
through our glorious Christianity which has effected 
all the good that has ever been wrought, and which 
is yet to reconstruct all the nations. 



The Female Hottentot. 



The Female Gorill 

THE MISSING LINK. 



CHAPTER XXVI. 



THE MISSING LINK. 

It seems to me that evolutionists are trying to im- 
press the great masses of the people with the idea 
that there is an ancestral line leading from the primal 
germ on up through the serpent, and on up through 
the quadruped, and on up through the gorilla to man. 
They admit that there is " a missing link," as they 
call it, but there is not a missing link — it is a whole 
chain gone. Between the physical construction of 
the highest animal and the physical construction of 
the lowest man, there is a chasm as wide as the At- 
lantic Ocean. 

Evolutionists tell us that somewhere in Central 
Africa, or in Borneo, there is a creature half-way 
between the brute and the man, and that that creat- 
ure is the highest step in the animal ascent, and the 
lowest step in the human creation. But what are the 
facts ? The brain of the largest gorilla that was- ever 
found is thirty cubic inches, while the brain of the 
most ignorant man that was ever found is seventy. 
Vast difference between thirty and seventy. It 
needs a bridge of forty arches to span that gulf. 

Beside that, there is a difference between the 
gorilla and the man — a difference of blood globule, a dif- 
ference of nerve, a difference of muscle, a difference 
of bone, a difference of sinew. The horse is more 
like man in intelligence, the bird is more like him in 

267 



268 



THE MISSING LINK. 



musical capacity, the mastiff more like him in affec- 
tion. That eulogized beast of which we hear so 
much, represented on the walls of ancient cities 
thousands of years ago, is just as complete as it is 
now, showing that there has not been a particle of 
change. 

Beside that, if a pair of apes had a man for descend- 
ant, why would not all the apes have the same kind 
of descendants? Can it be that that one favored 
pair only was honored with human progeny? Be- 
side that, evolution says that as one species rises to 
another species, the old type dies off. Then how is 
it that there are whole kingdoms of chimpanzee and 
gorilla and baboon ? 

The evolutionists have come together and have 
tried to explain a bird's wing. Their theory has al- 
ways been that a faculty of an animal while being 
developed must always be useful, and always bene- 
ficial, but the wing of a bird, in the thousands of 
years it was being developed, so far from being any 
help, must have been a hindrance, until it could be 
brought into practical use away on down in the ages. 
Must there not have been an intelligent will some- 
where that formed that wonderful flying instrument, 
so that a bird five hundred times heavier than the air, 
can mount it and put gravitation under claw and 
beak? That wonderful mechanical instrument, the 
wing, with between twenty and thirty different ap- 
parati curiously constructed, does it not imply a 
divine intelligence? Does it not imply a direct act of 
some outside being ? All the evolutionists in the world 
cannot explain a bird's wing, or an insect's wing. 

So they are confounded by the rattle of the rattle- 
snake. Ages before that reptile had any enemies, 



THE MISSING LINK. 



269 



this warning weapon was created. Why was it 
created ? When the reptile far back in the ages had 
no enemies, why this warning weapon ? There must 
have been a divine intelligence foreseeing and know- 
ing that in the ages to come that reptile would have 
enemies, and then this warning weapon would be 
brought into use. You see evolution at every step is 
a contradiction or a monstrosity. At every stage of 
animal life, as well as at every stage of human life, 
there is evidence of direct action of divine will. 

Beside that, it is very evident from another fact 
that we are an entirely different creation, and that there 
is no kinship. The animal in a few hours or months 
comes to full strength and can take care of itself. 
The human race for the first one, two, three, five, ten 
years, is incomplete helplessness. The chick just 
come out of its shell begins to pick up its own food. 
The dog, the wolf, the lion, soon earn their own liveli- 
hood and act for their own defence. The human 
race does not come to development until twenty or 
thirty years of age, and by that time the animals that 
were born the same year the man was born — the 
vast majority of them — have died of old age. This 
shows there is no kinship, there is no similarity. If 
we had been born of the beast, we would have had 
the beast's strength at the start, or it would have had 
our weakness. Not only different but opposite. 

Darwin admits that the dovecote pigeon has not 
changed in thousands of years. It is demonstrated 
over and over again that the lizard on the lowest 
formation of rocks was just as complete as the lizard 
now. It is shown that the ganoid, the first fish, was 
just as complete as the sturgeon, another name for 
the same fish now. Darwin's entire system is a guess, 



270 



THE MISSING LINK. 



and Huxley, and John Stuart Mill, and Tyndall, and 
especially Professor Heckel, come to help him in the 
guess, and guess about the brute, and guess about 
man, and guess about worlds, but as to having one 
solid foot of ground to stand on, they never have had 
it and never will have it. 

I put in opposition to these evolutionist theories 
the inward consciousness that we have no consan- 
guinity with the dog that fawns at our feet, or the 
spider that crawls on the wall, or the fish that flops 
in the frying pan, or the crow that swoops on the 
field carcass, or the swine that wallows in the mire. 
Everybody sees the outrage it would be to put beside 
the Bible record that Abraham begat Isaac, and 
Isaac begat Jacob, and Jacob begat Judah, the record 
that the microscopic animalculae begat the tadpole, 
and the tadpole begat the poly wog, and the poly wog 
begat the serpent, and the serpent begat the quad- 
ruped, and the quadruped begat the baboon, and the 
baboon begat man. 

The evolutionists tell us that the apes were origi- 
nally fond of climbing the trees, but after a while they 
lost their prehensile power, and therefore could not 
climb with any facility, and hence they surrendered 
monkeydom and set up in business as men. Failures 
as apes, successes as men. According to the evolu- 
tionists a man is a bankrupt monkey ! I pity the 
person who in every nerve and muscle and bone and 
mental faculty and spiritual experience does not real- 
ize that he is higher in origin, and has had a grander 
ancestry than the beasts which perish. However de- 
graded men and women may be, and though they 
may have foundered on the rocks of crime and sin, 
and though we shudder as we pass them, neverthe- 



THE MISSING LINK. 2Jl 

less, there is something- within us that tells us they 
belong to the same great brotherhood and sisterhood 
of our race, and our sympathies are aroused in regard 
to them. But gazing upon the swiftest gazelle, or 
upon the tropical bird of most flamboyant wing, or 
upon the curve of grandest courser's neck, we feel 
there is no consanguinity. The grandest, the highest, 
the noblest of them is ten thousand fathoms below 
what we are conscious of being. 

It is not that we are stronger than they, for the 
lion with one stroke of his paw could put us into the 
dust. It is not that we have better eyesight, for the 
eagle can descry a mole a mile away. It is not that 
we are fleeter of foot, for a roebuck in a flash is out 
of sight, just seeming to touch the earth as he goes. 
Many of the animal creation surpass us in fleetness 
of foot and in keenness of nostril, and in strength 
of limb ; but notwithstanding all that, there is some- 
thing within us that tells us we are of celestial pedi- 
gree. Not of the mollusk, not of the rizipod, not of 
the primal germ, but of the living and omnipotent 
God. Lineage of the skies. Genealogy of Heaven. 

I tell you plainly, that if your father was a musk- 
rat and your mother an opossum, and your great 
aunt a kangaroo, and the toads and the snapping tur- 
tles were your illustrious predecessors, my father 
was God. I know it. I feel it. It thrills through 
me with an emphasis and an ecstasy which all your 
arguments drawn from anthropology and biology and 
zoology and morology and paleontology and all the 
other ologies, can never shake. 

Evolution is one great mystery. It hatches out 
fifty mysteries, and the fifty hatch out a thousand, 
and the thousand hatch out a million. Why, my 



THE MISSING LINK. 



brother, not admit the one great mystery of God, and 
have that settle all the other mysteries? I can more 
easily appreciate the fact that God, by one stroke of 
His omnipotence could make man, than I could 
realize how, out of five millions of ages, He could 
have evolved one, putting on a little here and a little 
there. It would have been just as great a miracle 
for God to have turned an orang-outang into a man 
as to make a man out and out — the one job just as big 
as the other. 

It seems to me we had better let God have a little 
place in our world somewhere. It seems to me if we 
cannot have Him make all creatures, we had better 
have Him make two or three. There ought to be 
some place where He could stay without interfering 
with the evolutionists. " No," says Darwin, and so 
for years he is trying to raise fan-tailed pigeons, and 
to turn these fan-tail pigeons into some other kind of 
pigeon, or to have them go into something that is not 
a pigeon — turning them into quail, or barnyard fowl, 
or brown thresher. But pigeon it is. And others 
have tried with the ox and the dog and the horse, 
but they stayed in their species. If they attempt to 
cross over it is a hybrid, and a hybrid is always sterile 
and goes into extinction. There has been only one 
successful attempt to pass over from speechless ani- 
mal to the articulation of man, and that was the at- 
tempt which Baalam witnessed in the beast that he 
rode ; but an angel of the Lord, with drawn sword, 
soon stopped that long-eared evolutionist. 

But, says some one, "If we can not have God make 
a man let us have Him make a horse." " Oh, no! " 
says Huxley, in his great lectures in New York several 
years ago. No, he does not want any God around 



THE MISSING LINK. 



273 



the premises. God did not make the horse. The 
horse came of the pliohippus, and the pliohippus 
came from the protohippus, and the protohippus 
came from the mio-hippus, and the mio-hippus came 
from the meshohippus, and the meshohippus came 
from the orohippus, and so away back, all the living- 
creatures, we trace it in a line, until we get to the 
moneron, and no evidence of divine intermeddling 
with the creation until you get to the moneron, and 
that, Huxley says, is of so low a form of life that the 
probability is it just made itself, or was the result of 
spontaneous generation. What a narrow escape from 
the necessity of having a God. 

As near as I can tell, these evolutionists seem to 
think that God at the start had not made up His mind 
as to exactly what He would make, and having made 
up his mind partially, He has been changing it all 
through the ages. I believe God made the world as 
He wanted to have it, and that the happiness of all 
the species will depend upon their staying in the 
species where they were created. 

But, my friends, evolution is not only infidel and 
atheistic and absurd ; it is brutalizing in its tendencies. 
If there is anything in the world that will make a 
man bestial in his habits it is the idea that he was 
descended from the beast. Why, according to the 
idea of these evolutionists, we are only a superior 
kind of cattle, a sort of Alderney among other herds. 
To be sure, we browse on better pasture, and we 
have better stall and better accommodations, but then 
we are only Southdowns among the great flocks of 
sheep. Born of a beast, to die like a beast ; for the 
evolutionists have no idea of a future world. They 
say the mind is only a superior part of the body. 

18 



2/4 THE MISSING LINK. 

They say our thoughts are only molecular formation. 
They say when the body dies, the whole nature dies. 
The slab of the sepulchre is not a milestone on a 
journey upward, but a wall shutting us into eternal 
nothingness. We all die alike — the cow, the horse, 
the sheep, the man, the reptile. Annihilation is the 
heaven of the evolutionist. 

From such a stenchful and damnable doctrine turn 
away. Compare that idea of your origin — an idea 
filled with the chatter of apes, and the hiss of ser- 
pents, and the croak of frogs — to an idea in one or 
two stanzas which I shall read to you from an old 
book of more than Demosthenic, or Homeric, or 
Dantesque power: " What is man, that thou art 
mindful of him ? and the son of man, that thou visit- 
est him? Thou hast made him a little lower than 
the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and 
honor. Thou madest him to have dominion over 
the works of thy hand ; thou hast put all things 
under his feet. All sheep and oxen, yea, and the 
beasts of the field ; the fowl of the air, and the fish 
of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths 
of the seas. Oh, Lord, our Lord, how excellent is 
Thy name in all the earth." 

How do you like that origin? The lion the mon- 
arch of the field, the eagle the monarch of the air, 
behemoth the monarch of the deep, but man monarch 
of all. Ah ! my friends, I have to say to you that I 
am not so anxious to know what was rav origin as to 
know what will be my destiny. I do not care so 
much where I came from as where I am going to. I 
am not so interested in who was my ancestry ten 
million years ago as I am to know where I will be 
ten million years from now. I am not so much inter- 



THE MISSING LINK. 



275 



ested in the preface to my cradle as I am interested 
in the appendix to my grave. I do not care so much 
about protoplasm as I do about eternasm. The " was " 
is overwhelmed with the " to be." And here comes 
in the evolution I believe in : not natural evolution, 
but gracious and divine and heavenly evolution — evo- 
lution out of sin into holiness, out of grief into glad- 
ness, out of mortality into immortalit}^, out of earth 
into heaven ! That is the evolution I believe in. 

Evolution from evolvere, unrolling ! Unrolling of 
attributes, unrolling of rewards, unrolling of exper- 
ience, unrolling of angelic companionship, unrolling 
of divine glory, unrolling of providential obscurities, 
unrolling of doxologies, unrolling of rainbow to 
canopy the throne, unrolling of a new heaven and a 
new earth in which to dwell righteousness. Oh, the 
thought overwhelms me. I have not the physical 
endurance to consider it. 

Monarchs on earth of all lower orders of creation, 
and then lifted to be hierarchs in Heaven. Master- 
piece of God's wisdom and goodness, our humanity ; 
masterpiece of divine grace, our enthronement. I 
put one foot on Darwin's " Origin of the Species," 
and I put the other foot on Spencer's " Biology," and 
then holding in one hand the book of Moses 1 see our 
Genesis, and holding in the other hand the book of 
Revelation, I see our celestial arrival. For all wars 
I prescribe the Bethlehem chant of the angels. For 
all sepulchres I prescribe the archangel's trumpet. 
For all the earthly griefs I prescribe the hand that 
wipes away all tears from all eyes. Not an evolution 
from beast to man, but an evolution from contestant to 
conqueror, and from the struggle with wild beasts in 
the arena of the amphitheatre to a soft, high, blissful 
seat in the King's galleries. 



CHAPTER XXVII. 



EVANGELISM VINDICATED. 

Domitian, the Roman Emperor, had in his realm 
a troublesome evangelist who would keep preaching, 
and so he exiled him to a barren island, as now the 
Russians exile convicts to Siberia, or as sometimes 
the English Government used to send prisoners to 
Australia. The island I speak of is now called Pat- 
mos, and is so barren and unproductive that its 
inhabitants live by fishing. 

But one day the evangelist of whom I speak, sit- 
ting at the mouth of a cavern on the hill-side, and 
perhaps half asleep under the drone of the sea, has a 
supernatural dream, and before him pass, as in pano- 
rama, time and eternity. Among the strange things 
that he saw was an angel with a little book in his 
hand, and in his dream the evangelist asked for this 
little book, and the angel gave it to him, and told 
him to eat it up. As in a dream things are sometimes 
incongruous, the evangelist took the little book and 
ate it up. The angel told him beforehand that it 
would be very sweet in the mouth, but afterward he 
would be troubled with indigestion. True enough, 
the evangelist devours the book, and it becomes to 
him a sweetness during the mastication, but after- 
ward a physical bitterness. 

Who the angel was and what the book was no one 
can tell. The commentators do not agree, and I shall 

276 



EVANGELISM VINDICATED. 2JJ 

take no responsibility of interpretation, but will tell 
you that it suggests to me the little book of creeds, 
which skeptics take and chew up and find a very 
luscious morsel to their witticism, but after awhile 
it is to them a great distress. The angel of the 
church hands out this little book of evangelism, and 
the antagonists of the Christian Church take it and 
eat it up, and it makes them smile at first, but after- 
ward it is to them a dire dyspepsia. 

All intelligent people have creeds — that is, favorite 
theories which they have adopted. Political creeds 
— that is, theories about tariff, about finance, about 
civil service, about government. Social creeds — 
that is, theories about manners and customs and 
good neighborhoed. ^Esthetical creeds — that is, 
theories about tapestry, about bric-a-brac, about styles 
of ornamentation. Religious creeds — that is, theories 
about the Deity, about the soul, about the great 
future. The only being who has no creed about any- 
thing is the idiot. This scoffing against creeds is 
always a sign of profound ignorance on the part of 
the scoffer, for he has himself a hundred creeds in 
regard to other things. In our time the beliefs of evan- 
gelistic churches are under a fusilade of caricature 
and misrepresentation. Men set up what they call 
orthodox faith, and then they rake it with the mus- 
ketry of their denunciation. They falsify what the 
Christian churches believe. They take evangelical 
doctrines and set them in a harsh and repulsive way, 
and put them out of the association with other truths. 
They are like a mad anatomist who, desiring to tell 
what a man is, dissects a human body and hangs up 
in one place the heart, and in another place the two 
lungs, and in another place an ankle bone, and says 



278 EVANGELISM VINDICATED. 

that is a man. They are only fragments of a man 
wrenched out of their God-appointed places. 

Evangelical religion is a healthy, symmetrical, well- 
jointed, roseate, bounding life, and the scalpel and 
dissecting knife of the infidel or the atheist cannot 
tell you what it is. Evangelical religion is as differ- 
ent from what it is represented to be by these ene- 
mies, as the scarecrow, which the farmer puts in the 
cornfield to keep off the ravens, is different from the 
farmer himself. 

For instance, these enemies of evangelism say that 
the Presbyterian Church believes that God is a sav- 
age sovereign, and that He made some men just to 
damn them, and that there are infants in hell a span 
long. These old slanders come down from genera- 
tion to generation. The Presbyterian Church be- 
lieves no such thing. The Presbyterian Church 
believes that God is a loving and just sovereign, and 
that we are free agents. " No, no ! that cannot be," 
say these men who have chewed up the creed, and 
have the consequent embittered stomachs. " That is 
impossible ; if God is a sovereign, we can't be free 
agents." Why, my friends, we admit this in every 
other direction. I, De Witt Talmage, am a free cit- 
izen of Brooklyn. I go when I please, and I come 
when I please, but I have at least four sovereigns. 
The Church Court of our denomination ; that is my 
ecclesiastical sovereign. The mayor of this city ; he 
is my municipal sovereign. The governor of New 
York; he is my state sovereign. The president 
of the United States ; he is my national sovereign. 
Four sovereigns have I, and yet in every faculty of 
body, mind, and soul, 1 am a free man. So, you see, 
it is possible that the two doctrines go side by side, 



EVANGELISM VINDICATED. 279 

and there is a common-sense way of presenting it, and 
there is a way that is repulsive. If you have the two 
doctrines in a worldly direction, why not in a reli- 
gious direction ? If I choose to-morrow morning to 
walk into the Mercantile Library, and improve my 
mind, or to go through the conservatory of my 
friend at Jamaica, who has flowers from all lands 
growing under the arches of glass, and who has an 
aquarium all a-squirm with trout and gold fish, and 
there are trees bearing oranges and bananas — if I want 
to go there, I could. I am free to go. If I want to go 
over to Hoboken, and leap into a furnace of an oil fac- 
tory, if I want to jump from the platform of the Phila- 
delphia express train, if I want to leap from Brooklyn 
bridge, I may. But suppose I should go to-morrow, 
and leap into the furnace at Hoboken, who would be to 
blame ? That is all there is about sovereignty and 
free agency. God rules and reigns, and He has con- 
servatories, and He has blast furnaces. If you want 
to walk in the gardens, walk there. If you want to 
leap into the furnaces, you may. 

Suppose now, a man had a charmed key with 
which he could open all the jails, and he should open 
Raymond Street Jail, and the New York Tombs, 
and all the prisons on the continent. In three weeks 
what kind of a country would this be ? all the inmates 
turned out of those prisons and penitentiaries. Sup- 
pose all the reprobates, the bad spirits, the outrageous 
spirits, should be turned into the New Jerusalem. 
Why, the next morning the gates of pearl would be 
found off hinge, the linchpin would be gone out of 
the chariot wheels, the "house of many mansions" 
would be burglarized. Assault and battery, arson, 
libertinism, and assassination would reside in the 



280 



EVANGELISM VINDICATED. 



capital of the skies. Angels of God would be in- 
sulted on the streets. Heaven would be a dead fail- 
ure if there were no great lock-up, if all people, 
without regard to their character, when they leave 
this world, go right into glory. 

1 wonder if, in the temple of the skies, Charles 
Guiteau and John Wilkes Booth occupy the same 
pew! Your common-sense demands two destinies! 
And then, as to the Presbyterian Church believing 
there are infants in perdition, if you will bring me a 
Presbyterian of good morals and sound mind who 
will say that he believes there ever was a baby in the 
lost world, or ever will be, I will make him a deed to 
ail my property, and he can take possession to- 
morrow. 

So the Episcopalian Church is misrepresented by 
the enemies of evangelism. They say that church sub- 
stitutes forms and ceremonies for heart religion, and 
it is all a matter of liturgy and genuflexion. False 
again. All Episcopalians will tell you that the forms 
and creeds of their church are worse than nothing 
unless the. heart go with them. 

So also the Baptist Church has been misrepresented. 
The enemies of evangelism say the Baptist Church 
believes that unless a man is immersed he will never 
get into heaven. False again. All the Baptists, close 
communion and open communion, believe that if a 
man accept the Lord Jesus Christ he will be saved, 
whether he be baptized by one drop of water on the 
forehead, or be plunged into the Ohio or Susque- 
hanna, although immersion is the only gate by which 
one enters their earthly communion. 

The enemies of evangelism also misrepresent the 
Methodist Church. They say the Methodist Church 



EVANGELISM VINDICATED. 



28l 



believes that a man can convert himself, and that con- 
version in that church is a temporary emotion, and 
that all a man has to do is to kneel down at the altar 
and feel bad, and then the minister pats him on the 
back and says, " It is all right," and that is all there is 
of it. False again. The Methodist Church believes 
that the Holy Ghost alone can convert a heart, and 
in that church conversion is an earthquake of convic- 
tion, and a sunburst of pardon. And as to mere 
" temporary emotion," I wish we all had more of the 
" temporary emotion " which lasted Bishop Janes and 
Matthew Simpson for a half century; keeping them 
on fire for God until their holy enthusiasm consumed 
their bodies. 

So all the evangelical denominations are misrepre- 
sented. And then these enemies of evangelism go 
on and hold up the great doctrines of the Christian 
Churches as absurd, dry, and inexplicable technical- 
ities. " There is your doctrine of the Trinity," they 
say. " Absurd beyond all bounds. The idea that 
there is a God in three persons ! Impossible. If it 
is one God He can't be three, and if there are three, 
they can't be one." At the same time all of us — they 
with us — acknowledge trinities all around us. Trin- 
ity in our own make-up — body, mind, soul. Body 
with which we move, mind with which we think, 
soul with which we love. Three, yet one man. 
Trinity in the air — light, heat, moisture — yet one 
atmosphere. Trinity in the court room — three 
judges on the bench, but one court. Trinities all 
around about us, in earthly government and in na- 
ture. Of course, all the illustrations are defective 
for the reason that the natural cannot fully illustrate 
the spiritual. But suppose an ignorant man should 



282 



EVANGELISM VINDICATED. 



come up to a chemist and say : " I deny what you 
say about the water and about the air ; they are not 
made of different parts. The air is one ; I breathe it 
every day. The water is one ; I drink it every day. 
You can't deceive me about the elements that go to 
make up the air and the water." The chemist would 
say : " You come up into my laboratory and I will 
demonstrate this whole thing to you." The ignorant 
man goes into the chemist's laboratory, and sees for 
himself. He learns that the water is one and the air 
is one, but they are made up of different parts. So 
here is a man who says: "I can't understand the 
doctrine of the Trinity." God says: " You come up 
here into the laboratory after your death, and you 
will see — you will see it explained, you will see it 
demonstrated." The ignorant man cannot under- 
stand the chemistry of the water and the air until he 
goes into the laboratory, and we will never under- 
stand the Trinity until we go into heaven. The 
ignorance of the man who cannot understand the 
chemistry of the air and water does not change the 
fact in regard to the composition of air and water. 
Because we cannot understand the Trinity, does that 
change the fact ? 

"And there is your absurd doctrine about justifica- 
tion by faith," say these antagonists who have chewed 
up the little book of evangelism, and have the con- 
sequent embittered stomach — "justification by faith ; 
you can't explain it." I can explain it. It is simply 
this : When a man takes the Lord Jesus Christ as his 
Saviour from sin, God lets the offender off. Just as 
you have a difference with some one, he has injured 
you, he apologizes or he makes reparation, you say, 
" Now, that's all right, that's all right." Justification 



EVANGELISM VINDICATED. 



283 



by faith is this: A man takes Jesus Christ as his 
Saviour, and God says to the man, " Now, it was all 
wrong before, but it is all right now ; it is all right." 
That was what made Martin Luther what he was. 
Justification by faith, — it is going to conquer all 
nations. 

" There is your absurd doctrine about regenera- 
tion," these antagonists of evangelism say. What is 
regeneration? Why, regeneration is reconstruction. 
Anybody can understand that. Have you not seen 
people who are all made over again by some wonder- 
ful influence ? In other words, they are just as differ- 
ent now from what they used to be as possible. The 
old Constellation, man-of-war, lay down here at the 
Brooklyn Navy Yard. Famine came to Ireland. 
The old Constellation was fitted up, and though it 
had been carrying gunpowder and bullets it took 
bread to Ireland. You remember the enthusiasm as 
the old Constellation went out of our harbor, and 
with what joy it was greeted by the famishing nation 
on the other side the sea. That is regeneration. A 
man loaded up with sin and death loaded up with 
life. Refitted. Your observation has been very 
small indeed if you have not seen changes in charac- 
ters as radical as that. 



CHAPTER XXVIII. 



SPLENDORS OF ORTHODOXY. 

The Bible is not only divinely inspired, but it is 
divinely protected in its present shape. You could 
as easily, without detection, take from the writings of 
Shakspeare Hamlet, and institute in place thereof 
Alexander Smith's drama, as at any time during the 
last fifteen hundred years a man could have made any 
important change in the Bible without immediate de- 
tection. If there had been an element of weakness 
or of deception, or of disintegration, the Book would 
long ago have fallen to pieces. If there had been 
one loose brick or cracked casement in this castellated 
truth, surely the bombardment of eight centuries 
would have discovered and broken through that im- 
perfection. The fact that the Bible stands intact, 
notwithstanding all the furious assaults on all sides 
upon it, is proof to me that it is a miracle, and every 
miracle is of God. 

" But," say some, " do you really think the Scrip- 
tures are inspired thought ? " Yes, either as history 
or as guidance. Gibbon and Josephus and Prescott 
record in their histories a great many things they did 
not approve of. When George Bancroft put upon 
his brilliant historical page the account of an Indian 
massacre, does he approve of that massacre? There 
are scores of things in the Bible which neither God 
nor inspired men sanctioned. Either as history or 

284 



SPLENDORS OF ORTHODOXY. 



285 



as guidance, the entire Bible was inspired of God. 

" But," says some one, " don't you think that the 
copyists might have made mistakes in transferring 
the divine words from one manuscript to another?" 
Yes, no doubt there were such mistakes ; but they no 
more affect the meaning of the Scriptures than the 
misspelling of a word or the ungrammatical structure 
of a sentence in a last will and testament affect the 
validity or the 'meaning of that will. All the mis- 
takes made by the copyists in the Scriptures do not 
amount to any more importance than the difference 
between your spelling in a document the word forty, 
forty or fourty. This book is the last will and testa- 
ment of God to our lost world, and it bequeaths 
everything in the right way, although human hands 
may have damaged the grammar or made unjustifia- 
ble interpolation. 

These men who pride themselves in our day on 
being advanced thinkers in Biblical interpretation will 
all of them end in atheism, if they live long enough, 
and I declare here to-day they are doing'more in the 
different denominations of Christians, and throughout 
the world, for damaging Christianity and hindering 
the cause of the world's betterment, than five thou- 
sand Robert Ingersolls could do. That man who 
stands inside a castle is far more dangerous if he be 
an enemy than five thousand enemies outside the 
castle. Robert G. Ingersoll assails the castle from 
the outside. These men who pretend to be advanced 
thinkers in all the denominations are fighting the 
truth from the inside, and trying to shove back the 
bolts and swing open the gates. 

Now, I am in favor of the greatest freedom of 
religious thought and discussion. I would have as 







286 SPLENDORS OF ORTHODOXY. 

much liberty for heterodoxy as for orthodoxy. If I 
should change my theories of religion I should 
preach them out and out, but not in this building, 
for this was erected by people who believe in an 
entire Bible, and it would be dishonest for me to 
promulgate sentiments different from those for which 
this building was put up. When we enter any 
denomination as ministers of religion we take a 
solemn vow that we will preach the sentiments of 
that denomination. If we change our theories, as 
we have a right to change them, then there is a world 
several thousand miles in circumference, and there 
are hundreds of halls and hundreds of academies of 
music where we can ventilate our sentiments. 

I remember that in these cities, in time of political 
agitation, there are the Republican headquarters and 
the Democratic headquarters. Suppose I should go 
into one of these headquarters pretending to be in 
sympathy with their work, at the same time elec- 
tioneering for the opposite party. I would soon find 
that the centrifugal force was greater than the cen- 
tripetal. Now, if a man enters a denomination of 
Christians, taking a solemn oath, as we all do, that 
we will promulgate the theories of that denomi- 
nation, and then the man shall proclaim some other 
theory, he has broken his oath, and he is an out-and- 
out perjurer. Nevertheless, I declare for largest 
liberty in religious discussion. I would no more 
have the present attempt to rear a monument to 
Thomas Paine in New York interfered with than I 
would have interfered with the lifting of the splendid 
monument to Washington in Wall Street. Largest 
liberty for the body, largest liberty for the mind, 
largest liberty for the soul. 



SPLENDORS OF ORTHODOXY. 287 

Now, I want to show you, as a matter of advocacy 
for what I believe to be the right, the splendors of 
orthodoxy. Many have supposed that its disciples 
are people of flat skulls, and no reading, and behind 
the age, and the victims of gullibility. I shall show 
you that the word orthodoxy stands for the greatest 
splendors outside of heaven. Behold the splendors of 
its achievements. All the missionaries of the Gos- 
pel, the world round, are men who believe in an 
entire Bible. Call the roll of all the missionaries 
who are to-day enduring sacrifices in the ends of the 
earth for the cause of religion and the world's better- 
ment, and they all believe in an entire Bible. Just 
as soon as a missionary begins to doubt whether 
there ever was a Garden of Eden, or whether there 
is any such thing as future punishment, he comes 
right home from Beyrout or Madras, and goes into 
the insurance business ! All the missionary societies 
of this day are officered by orthodox men, and are 
supported by orthodox churches. 

Orthodoxy, beginning with the Sandwich Islands, 
has captured vast regions of barbarism for civiliza- 
tion, while heterodoxy has to capture the first square 
inch. Blatant for many years in Great Britain and 
the United States, and strutting about with a pea- 
cockian braggadocio, it has yet to capture the first 
continent, the first State, the first township, the first 
ward, the first space of ground as big as you could 
cover with the small end of a sharp pin. Ninety- 
nine out of every hundred of the Protestant churches 
of America were built by people who believed in an 
entire Bible. The pulpit now may preach some 
other Gospel, but it is a heterodox gun on an ortho- 
dox carriage. The foundations of all the churches 



288 



SPLENDORS OF ORTHODOXY. 



that are of very great use in this world to-day, were 
laid by men who believed the Bible from lid to lid, 
and if I can not take it in that way, I will not take it 
at all. 

No church of very great influence to-day but was 
built by those who believe in an entire Bible. Nei- 
ther will a church last long built on a part of the 
Bible. You have noticed, I suppose, that as soon as 
a man begins to give up the Bible, he is apt to preach 
in some hall, and he has an audience while he lives, 
and when he dies, the church dies. If I thought that 
this church was built on a quarter of a Bible, or a 
half of a Bible, or three-quarters of a Bible, or ninety- 
nine one-hundredths of a Bible, I would expect it to 
die when I die ; but when I know it is built on the 
entire Word of God, I know it will last two hundred 
years after you and I sleep the last sleep. Oh, the 
splendors of 'an orthodoxy which, with ten thousand 
hands and ten thousand pulpits and ten thousand 
Christian churches, is trying to save the world ! 

Behold the splendors of character built by ortho- 
doxy. Who had the greatest human intellect the 
world ever knew ? Paul. In physical stature insig- 
nificant ; in mind, head and shoulders above all the 
giants of the age. Orthodox from scalp to heel. 
Who was the greatest poet the ages ever saw, 
acknowledged to be so both by infidels and Chris- 
tians ? John Milton, seeing more without eyes than 
anybody else ever saw with eyes. Orthodox from 
scalp to heel. Who was the greatest reformer the 
world has ever seen ? so acknowledged by infidels as 
well as by Christians. Martin Luther. Orthodox 
from scalp to heel. 

Then look at the certitudes. O man, believing in 



4 



SPLENDORS OF ORTHODOXY. 289 

an entire Bible, where did you come from ? Answer: 
" I descended from a perfect parentage in Paradise, 
and Jehovah breathed into my nostrils the breath of 
life. I am a son of God." O man, believing in a 
half-and-half Bible — believing in a Bible in spots, 
where did you come from? Answer: " It is all un- 
certain ; in my ancestral line away back there was an 
orang-outang and a tadpole and a polywog, and it 
took millions of years to get me evoluted." O man, 
believing in a Bible in spots, where are you going to 
when you quit this world ? Answer : " Going into 
a great to be, so on into the great somewhere, and 
then I shall pass through on to the great anywhere, 
and I shall probably arrive in the nowhere." That is 
where I thought you would fetch up. O man, believ- 
ing in an entire Bible, and believing with all your 
heart, where are you going to when you leave this 
world? Answer: "I am going to my Father's 
house ; I am going into the companionship of my 
loved ones who have gone before ; I am going to leave 
all my sins, and I am going to be with God and like 
God forever and forever." Oh, the glorious certi- 
tudes, certainties of orthodoxy ! 

Behold the splendors of orthodoxy in its announce- 
ment of two destinies. 

Palace and penitentiary. Palace with gates on all 
sides through which all may enter and live on celes- 
tial luxuries world without end, and all for the knock- 
ing and the asking. A palace grander than if all the 
Alhambras and the Versailles and the Windsor castles 
and the winter gardens and the imperial abodes of all 
the earth were heaved up into one architectural glory. 
At the other end of the universe a penitentiary where 
men who want their sins can have them. Would it 

19 



29O SPLENDORS OF ORTHODOXY. 

be fair that you and I should have our choice of 
Christ and the palace, and other men be denied their 
choice of sin and eternal degradation? Palace and 
penitentiary. The first of no use unless you have the 
last. Brooklyn and New York would be better places 
to live in with Raymond Street Jail and the Tombs 
and Sing Sing, and all the small-pox hospitals emptied 
on us than heaven would be if there were no hell. 
Palace and penitentiary. If I see a man with a full 
bowl of sin, and he thirsts for it, and his whole nature 
craves it, and he takes hold with both hands and 
presses that bowl to his lips, and then presses it hard 
between his teeth, and the draught begins to pour its 
sweetness down his throat, shall we snatch away the 
bowl and jerk the man up to the gate of heaven, and 
push him in if he does not want to go and sit down 
and sing psalms forever ? No. God has made you 
and me so completely free that we need not go to 
heaven unless we prefer it. Not more free to soar 
than free to sink. 

Young men, old men, middle aged men, take sides 
in this contest between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. 
" Ask for the old paths, walk therein, and ye shall 
find rest for your souls." But you follow this cru- 
sade against any part of the Bible — first of all you 
will give up Genesis, which is as true as Matthew; 
then you will give up all the historical parts of the 
Bible ; then after a while you will give up the mira- 
cles ; then you will find it convenient to give up the 
Ten Commandments : and then after a while you will 
wake up in a fountainless, rockless, treeless desert 
swept of everlasting sirocco. If you are laughed at 
you can afford to be laughed at for standing by the 
Bible, just as God has given it to you and miracu- 
lously preserved it. 



SPLENDORS OF ORTHODOXY. 2gi 

Do not jump overboard from the staunch old 
Great Eastern of old-fashioned orthodoxy until there 
is something ready to take you up stronger than the 
fantastic yawl which has painted on the side, " Ad- 
vanced Thought," and which leaks at the prow and 
leaks at the stern, and has a steel pen for one oar and 
a glib tongue for the other oar, and now tips over 
this way and then tips over that way, until you do 
not know whether the passengers will land in the 
breakers of despair or on the sinking sand of infidelity 
and atheism. 

I am in full sympathy with the advancements of 
our time, but this world will never advance a single 
inch beyond this old Bible. God was just as capable 
of dictating the truth to the prophets and apostles 
as he is capable of dictating the truth to these mod- 
ern apostles and prophets. God has not learned 
anything in a thousand years. He knew just as 
much when He gave the first dictation as He does 
now, giving the last dictation, if He is giving any 
dictation at all. So I will stick to the old paths. I 
prefer the thick, warm robe of the old religion — old 
as God — the robe which has kept so many warm amid 
the cold pilgrimage of this life, and amid the chills 
of death. The old robe rather than the thin, uncer- 
tain gauze offered us by these wise-acres who believe 
the Bible in spots. 



CHAPTER XXIX. 



MENDING THE BIBLE. 

" If any man shall take away from the words of the book of this 
prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and 
out of the holy city."— Rev. 22: 19. 

You see it is a very risky business, this changing- of 
the Holy Scriptures. 

A pulpit in New York has recently set forth the 
idea that the Scriptures ought to be expurgated, that 
portions of them are unfit to be read, and the inspi- 
ration of much of the Bible has been denied. Among 
other striking statements are these : 

The Book of Genesis is a tradition of creation, a 
successive layer of traditions thought out centuries 
before. Moses' mistakes about creation were the 
mistakes of his age. That there are many systems of 
theology in the New Testament. That Paul had all 
the notions of the rabbinical schools of his time. 
That Job winds up his epilogue in genuine fairy-tale 
style. That Revelation is a long array of misshapen 
progeny in the apocalyptic writings, tracing them- 
selves back to Daniel. That Revelation comes to a 
madman, or leaves him mad. That what he calls the 
abominable lewdness of some things in the Old Tes- 
tament is not fit to be read. That it is an abominable 
misuse of the Bible to suppose the prophecies really 
foretell future events. That the book of Daniel is 
not in the right place. That Solomon's Songs are not 

292 



MENDING THE BIBLE. 



293 



in the right place, and he seems to applaud the idea 
of some one who said that the book of Solomon's 
Songs ought not to be in any one's hands under thirty 
years of age. He intimates that he does not believe 
that Samson slew a thousand men with the jawbone 
of an ass. That the whole Bible has been improperly 
chopped up into chapters and verses. 

He does not believe the beginning of the Bible, 
and he does not believe the close of it, nor anything 
between as fully inspired of God, and he thinks the 
Book ought to be expurgated, and there are those 
who re-echo the same sentiment. 

Now, I believe in the largest liberty of discussion, 
aud there are halls, and opera-houses, and academies 
of music, where the Bible and Christianity may be 
assaulted without interruption ; but when a minister 
of the Gospel surrenders the faith of any denomi- 
nation, his first plain, honest duty, is to get out of it. 
What would you think of the clerk in a dry-goods 
store, or a factory, or a banking-house, who should go 
to criticising the books of the firm, and denouncing 
the behavior of the firm, still taking the salary of that 
firm and the support of that firm, and doing all his 
denunciation of the books of the firm under its cover? 
Certainly, a minister of the Gospel ought to be as 
honest with his denomination, as a dry-goods clerk is 
honest with his employers. 

The heinousness of finding fault with the Bible at 
this time by a Christian minister is most evident. In 
our day the Bible is assailed by scurrility, by mis- 
representation, by infidel scientist, by all the vice of 
earth and all the venom of perdition, and at this par- 
ticular time ministers of religion fall into line of crit- 
icism of the Word of God. Why, it makes me think 



294 MENDING THE BIBLE. 

of a ship in a September equinox, the waves dashing 
to the top of the smoke-stack, and the hatches 
fastened down, and many prophesying the founder- 
ing of the steamer, and at that time some of the 
crew with axes and saws go down into the hold of 
the ship, and try to saw off some of the planks and 
pry out some of the timbers because the timber did 
not come from the right forest ! It does not seem to 
me commendable business for the crew to be helping 
the winds and storms outside with their axes and 
saws inside. 

Now, this old Gospel ship, what with the roaring 
of earth and hell around the stem and stern, and 
mutiny on deck, is having a very rough voyage, but 
I have noticed that not one of the timbers has started, 
and the Captain says He will see it through. And I 
have noticed that keelson and counter-timber knee 
are built out of Lebanon cedar, and she is going to 
weather the gale, but no credit to those who make 
mutiny on deck. 

When I see ministers of religion in this particular 
day finding fault with the Scriptures, it makes me 
think of a fortress terrifically bombarded, and the 
men on the ramparts, instead of swabbing out and 
loading the guns and helping fetch up the ammu- 
nition from the magazine, are trying with crowbars 
to pry out from the wall certain blocks of stone, be- 
cause they did not come from the right quarry. Oh, 
men on the ramparts, better fight back and fight 
down the common enemy, instead of trying to make 
breeches in the wall. 

While I oppose this expurgation of the Scriptures, 
1 shall give you my reasons for such opposition. 
"What ! " say some of the theological evolutionists, 



MENDING THE BIBLE. 295 

whose brains have been addled by too long brooding 
over them by Darwin and Spencer, " you don't now 
really believe all the story of the Garden of Eden, 
do you ? " Yes, as much as I believe all the roses 
that were in my garden last summer. " But," say 
they, " you don't really believe that the sun and moon 
stood still ? " Yes, and if I had strength enough to 
create a sun and moon I could make them stand still, 
or cause the refraction of the sun's rays so it would 
appear to stand still. " But," they say, " you don't 
really believe that the whale swallowed Jonah ? " 
Yes, and if I were strong enough to make a whale I 
could have made very easy ingress for the refractory 
prophet, leaving to Evolution to eject him, if he 
were an unworthy tenant. " But," say they, " you 
don't really believe that the water was turned into 
wine?" Yes, just as easily as water now is often 
turned into wine with an admixture of strychnine and 
logwood ! " But," say they, " you don't really believe 
that Samson slew a thousand with the jaw-bone of an 
ass?" Yes, as I think that the man who in this day 
assaults the Bible is wielding the same weapon ! 

There is nothing in the Bible that staggers me. 
There are many things I do not understand, I do 
not pretend to understand, never shall in this world 
understand. But that would be a very poor God 
who could be fully understood by the human. That 
would be a very small Infinite that can be measured 
by the finite. You must not expect to weigh the 
thunderbolts of Omnipotence in an apothecary's bal- 
ances. Starting with the idea that God can do any- 
thing, and that He was present at the beginning, and 
that He is present now, there is nothing in the Holy 
Scriptures to arouse skepticism in my heart. Here I 



296 MENDING THE BIBLE. 

stand, a fossil of the ages, dug up from the tertiary 
formation, fallen off the shelf of an antiquarian, a 
man in the latter part' of the glorious nineteenth cen- 
tury, believing in a whole Bible, from lid to lid ! 

I am opposed to the expurgation of the Scriptures 
in the first place, because the Bible in its present 
shape has been so miraculously preserved. Fifteen 
hundred years after Herodotus wrote his history, 
there was only one manuscript copy of it. Twelve 
hundred years after Plato wrote his book, there was 
only one manuscript copy of it. God was so careful 
to have us have the Bible in just the right shape, that 
we have fifty manuscript copies of the New Testa- 
ment, a thousand years old, and many of them fifteen 
hundred years old. This Book, handed down from 
the time of Christ, or just after the time of Christ, 
by the hand of such men as Origen, in the second 
century, and Tertullian, in the third century — men 
of different ages who died for their principles. The 
three best copies of the New Testament in manu- 
script in the possession of three great churches — the 
Protestant Church of England, the Greek Church of 
St. Petersburg, and the Romish Church of Italy. 

It is a plain matter of history that Tischendorf 
went to a convent in the peninsula of Sinai, and was 
by ropes lifted over the wall into the convent, that 
being the only mode of admission, and that he saw 
there in the waste basket for kindling for the fires, a 
manuscript of the Holy Scriptures. That night he 
copied many of the passages of that Bible, but it was 
not until fifteen years had passed of earnest entreaty 
and prayer, and coaxing, and purchase on his part 
that that copy of the Holy Scriptures was put into 
the hands of the Emperor of Russia — that one copy 
so marvelously protected. 



MENDING THE BIBLE. 



297 



Do you not know that the catalogue of the books 
of the Old and New Testaments, as we have it, is the 
same catalogue that has been coming on down 
through the ages ? Thirty-nine books of the Old 
Testament thousands of years ago. Thirty-nine now. 
Twenty-seven books of the New Testament, sixteen 
hundred years ago. Twenty-seven books of the New 
Testament now. Marcion, for wickedness, was 
turned out of the Church in the second century, and 
in his assault on the Bible and Christianity, he inci- 
dentally gives a catalogue of the books of the Bible — 
that catalogue corresponding exactly with ours — 
testimony given by the enemy of the Bible, and the 
enemy of Christianity. The catalogue now, just like 
the catalogue then. Assaulted and spit on, and torn 
to pieces and burned, yet adhering. The book to-day, 
in three hundred languages, confronting four-fifths 
of the human race in their own tongue. Three hun- 
dred million copies of it in existence. Does not that 
look as if this Book had been divinely protected, as 
if God had guarded it all through the centuries ? 

Not only have all the attempts to detract from the 
Book failed, but all the attempts to add to it. Many 
attempts were made to add the apochryphal books 
to the Old Testament. The Council of Trent, the 
Synod of Jerusalem, the Bishops of Hippo, all 
decided that the apochryphal books must be added 
to the Old Testament. " They must stay in," said 
those learned men, but they stayed out. There is 
not an intelligent Christian man that to-day will put 
the Book of Maccabeus or the Book of Judith beside 
the Book of Isaiah or Romans. Then a great many 
said, " We must have books added to the New Testa- 
ment," and there were epistles and Gospels and 



298 MENDING THE BIBLE. 

apocalypses written and added to the New Testa- 
ment, but they have all fallen out. You cannot add 
anything. You cannot subtract anything. Divinely 
protected book in the present shape. Let no man 
dare to lay his hands on it with the intention of 
detracting from the Book, or casting out any of these 
holy pages. 

I am also opposed to this proposed expurgation 
of the Scriptures for the fact that in proportion as 
people became self-sacrificing and good and holy 
and consecrated, they like the book as it is. I have 
yet to find a man or a woman distinguished for self- 
sacrifice, for consecration to God, for holiness of life, 
who wants the Bible changed. Many of us have 
inherited family Bibles. Those Bibles were in use 
twenty, forty, fifty, perhaps a hundred years in the 
generations. This afternoon, when you go home, 
take down those family Bibles, and find out if there 
are any chapters which have been erased by lead 
pencil or pen, and if in any margins you can find the 
words: " This chapter not fit to read." There has 
been plenty of opportunity during the last half cen- 
tury privately to expurgate the Bible. Do you 
know any case of such expurgation? Did not your 
grandfather give it to your father, and did not your 
father give it to you? 

Expurgate the Bible! You might as well go to 
the old picture galleries in Dresden and in Venice 
and in Rome and expurgate the old paintings. Per- 
haps you could find a foot of Michael Angelo's " Last 
Judgment " that might be improved. Perhaps you 
could throw more expression into Raphael's " Ma- 
donna." Perhaps you could put more pathos into 
Rubens' " Descent from the Cross." Perhaps you 



MENDING THE BIBLE. 



299 



could change the crests of the waves in Turner's 
" Slave Ship." Perhaps you might go into the old 
galleries of sculpture and change the forms and the 
postures of the statues of Phidias and Praxiteles. 
Such an iconoclast would very soon find himself in 
the penitentiary. But it is worse vandalism when a 
man proposes to re-fashion these masterpieces of in- 
spiration and to remodel the moral giants of this gal- 
lery of God. 

Now, let us divide off. Let those people who do 
not believe the Bible and who are critical of this and 
that part of it, go clear over to the other side. Let 
them stand behind the devil's guns. There can be no 
compromise between infidelity and Christianity. 
Give us the out and out opposition of infidelity 
rather than the work of these hybrid theologians, 
these mongrel ecclesiastics, these half and half evo- 
luted pulpiteers who believe the Bible and do not 
believe it, who accept the miracles and do not accept 
them, who believe in the inspiration of the Scriptures 
and do not believe in the inspiration of the Scriptures 
— trimming their belief on one side to suit the skep- 
ticism of the world, trimming their belief on the other 
side to suit the pride of their own heart, and feeling 
that in order to demonstate their courage they must 
make the Bible a target, and shoot at God. 

There is one thing that encourages me very much, 
and that is, that the Lord made out to manage the 
universe before they were born, and will probably be 
able to make out to manage the universe a little while 
after they are dead. While I demand that the antag- 
onists of the Bible, and the critics of the Bible go 
clear over where they belong, on the devil's side, I ask 
all the friends of this good Book to come out openly 



300 



MENDING THE BIBLE. 



and above board in behalf of it. That Book, which 
was the best inheritance you ever received from your 
ancestry, and which will be the best legacy you will 
leave to your children when you bid them good-bye 
as you cross the ferry to the golden city. 



CHAPTER XXX. 



THE GLORIOUS MARCH. 

"Fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with 
banners." — Solomon's Song 6: 10. 

The fragrance of spikenard, the flash of jewels, the 
fruitfulness of orchards, the luxuriance of gardens, 
the beauty of Heshbon fish-pools, the dew of the 
night, and the splendor of the morning — all contribute 
to the richness of Solomon's style, when he comes to 
speak of the glory of the Church. In contrast with 
his eulogium of the Church, look at the denunciatory 
things that are said in our day in regard to it. If one 
stockholder become a cheat, does that destroy the 
whole company ? If one soldier be a coward, does 
that condemn the whole army ? And yet there are 
many in this day so unphilosophic, so illogical, so 
dishonest, and so unfair as to denounce the entire 
Church of God because there are here and there bad 
men belonging to it. 

There are those who say that the Church of God 
is not up to the spirit of the day in which we live ; 
but I have to tell you that, notwithstanding all the 
swift wheels, and the flying shuttles, and the light- 
ning communications, the world has never yet been 
able to keep up with the Church. As high as God 
is above man, so high is the Church of God — higher 
than all human institutions. From her lamp the best 
discoveries of the world have been lighted. The 

301 



302 THE GLORIOUS MARCH. 

best of our inventors have believed in the Christian 
religion — the Fultons, the Morses, the Whitneys, the 
Perrys, and the Livingstones. She has owned the 
best of the telescopes and Leyden jars; and while 
infidelity and atheism have gone blindfolded among 
the most startling discoveries that were about to be 
developed, the earth, and the air, and the sea have 
made quick and magnificent responses to Christian 
philosophers. 

The world will not be up to the Church of Christ 
until the day when all merchandise has become hon- 
est merchandise, and all governments have become 
free governments, and all nations evangelized nations, 
and the last deaf ear of spiritual death shall be broken 
open by the million-voiced shout of nations born in a 
day. The Church that Nebuchadnezzar tried to 
burn in the furnace, and Darius to tear to pieces 
with the lions, and Lord Claverhouse to cut with the 
sword, has gone on, wading the floods and enduring 
the fire, until the deepest barbarism, and the fiercest 
cruelties, and the blackest superstitions have been 
compelled to look to the East, crying, "Who is she 
that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon 
clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with ban, 
ners?" God, who has determined that everything 
shall be beautiful in its season, has not left the night 
without charm. The moon rules the night. The 
stars are only set as gems in her tiara. Sometimes 
before the sun has gone down the moon mounts her 
throne, but it is after nightfall that she sways her un- 
disputed scepter over island and continent, river and 
sea. Under her shining the plainest maple leaves be- 
come shivering silver, the lakes from shore to shore 
look like shining mirrors, and the ocean under her 



THE GLORIOUS MARCH. 



305 



glance with great tides comes up panting upon the 
beach, mingling, as it were, foam and fire. 

Under the witchery of the moon the awful steeps 
lose their ruggedness, and the chasms their terror. 
The poor man blesses God for throwing so cheap a 
light through the broken window pane of his cabin, 
and to the sick it seems like a light from the other 
shore that bounds this great deep of human pain and 
woe. If the sun be like a song, full and loud and 
poured forth from brazen instruments that fill heaven 
and earth with harmony, the moon is plaintive and 
sad, standing beneath the throne of God, sending up 
her soft, sweet voice of praise, while the stars listen. 
And the sea ! No mother ever more lovingly watched 
a sick cradle than this pale watcher of the sky bends 
over the weary, heart-sick, slumbering earth, singing 
to it silvery music, while it is rocked in the cradle of 
the spheres. 

" Who is she, fair as the moon ? " Our answer is 
the Church. Like the moon, she is a borrowed light. 

She gathers up the glory of a Saviour's suffer- 
ings, a Saviour's death, a Saviour's resurrection, a 1 
Saviour's ascension, and pours that light on palace 
and dungeon, on squalid heathenism and elaborate 
skepticism, on widow's tears and martyr's robe of 
flame, on weeping penitence and loud-mouthed scorn. 

She is the only institution to-day that gives any 
light to our world. Into her portal the poor come 
and get the sympathy of a once pillowless Christ. 
The bereaved come and see the bottle in which God 
saves all our tears, and the captives come, and on the 
sharp corners of her altars dash off their chains, and 
the thirsty come and put their cup under the " Rock 
of Ages," which pours forth from its smitten side 

20 



306 THE GLORIOUS MARCH. 

living water, sparkling water, crystalline water, from 
under the throne of God and the Lamb. Blessed the 
bell that calls her worshipers to prayer. Blessed the 
water in which her members are baptized. Blessed 
the wine that glows in her sacramental cup. Blessed 
the songs on which her devotions travel up and the 
angels of God travel down. 

As the moon goes through the midst of the roaring 
storm-clouds unflushed and unharmed, and .comes 
out calm and beautiful on the other side, so the 
Church of God has gone through all the storms of 
this world's persecution and come out uninjured, no 
worse for the fact that Robespierre cursed it, and 
Voltaire caricatured it, and Tom Paine sneered at it, 
and all the forces of darkness have bombarded it. 
Not like some baleful comet shooting across the sky, 
scattering terror and dismay among the nations, but 
above the long howling night of the world's wretch- 
edness the Christian Church has made her mild way. 

After a season of storm or fog, how you are thrilled 
when the sun comes out at noonday ! The mists 
travel up, hill above hill, mountain above mountain, 
until they are sky lost. The forests are full of chirp 
and buzz and song ; honey-makers in the log, bird's 
beak pounding the bark, the chatter of the squirrel 
on the rail, the call of a hawk out of the clear sky, 
make you thankful for the sunshine which makes all 
the world so busy and so glad. The same sun which 
in the morning kindled conflagrations among the 
castles of cloud stoops down to paint the lily white, 
and the buttercup yellow, and the forget-me-not blue. 

Light for voyager on the deep ; light for shepherds 
guarding the flocks afield; light for the poor who 
have no lamps to burn ; light for the downcast and 



THE GLORIOUS MARCH. 



307 



the weary; light for aching eyes and burning brain 
and consuming captive ; light for the smooth brow 
of childhood and the dim vision of the octogenarian ; 
light for the. queen's coronet and sewing-girl's nee- 
dle. "Let there be light." 

" Who is she that looketh forth clear as the sun? " 
Our answer is, the Church. You have been going 
along a road before daybreak, and on one side you 
thought you saw a lion, and on the other side you 
thought you saw a goblin of the darkness, but when 
the sun came out, you found these were harmless 
apparitions. And it is the great mission of the 
Church of Jesus Christ to come forth " clear as the 
sun," to illumine all earthly darkness, to explain, as 
far as possible, all mystery, and to make the world 
radiant in its brightness ; and that which you thought 
was an aroused lion is found out to be a slumbering 
lamb ; and the sepulchral gates of your dead turn 
out to be the opening gates of heaven ; and that 
which you supposed was a flaming sword to keep 
you out of paradise is an angel of light to beckon 
you in. 

The lamps on her altars will cast their glow on 
your darkest pathway, and cheer you until, far 
beyond the need of lantern or lighthouse, you are 
safely anchored within the veil. O sun of the 
Church ! shine on until there is no sorrow to soothe, 
no tears to wipe away, no shackles to break, no more 
souls to be redeemed. Ten thousand hands of sin 
have attempted to extinguish the lamps on her altars, 
but they are quenchless ; and to silence her pulpits, 
but the thunder would leap, and the lightning would 
flame. 

The Church of God will yet come to full meridian, 



308 THE GLORIOUS MARCH. 

and in that day all the mountains of the world will 
be sacred mountains touched with the glory of 
Calvary, and all streams will flow by the mount of 
God like cool Siloam, and all lakes be redolent with 
Gospel memories like Gennesaret, and all islands of 
the sea be crowned with apocalyptic vision like Pat- 
mos, and all cities be sacred as Jerusalem, and all 
gardens luxuriant as Paradise, with God walking in 
the cool of the day. Then the chorals of grace will 
drown out all the anthems of earth. Then the throne 
of Christ will overtop all earthly authority. Then 
the crown of Jesus will outflame all other coronets. 
Sin destroyed. Death dead. Hell defeated. The 
Church triumphant. All the darknesses of sin, all the 
darknesses of trouble, all the darknesses of earthly 
mystery, hieing themselves to their dens. " Clear 
as the sun ! clear as the sun." 

You know there is nothing that excites a sol- 
dier's enthusiasm so much as an old flag. Many a 
man almost dead, catching a glimpse of the national 
ensign, has sprung to his feet, and started again into 
the battle. Now, my friends, I don't want you to 
think of the Church of Jesus Christ as a defeated in- 
stitution, as the victim of infidel sarcasm, something 
to be kicked, and cuffed, and trampled on through all 
the ages of the world. It is " an army with banners." 
It has an inscription and colors such as never stirred 
the hearts of an earthly soldiery. We have our ban- 
ner of recruit, and on it is inscribed, " Who is on the 
Lord's side ? " Our banner of defiance, and on it is 
inscribed, " The gates of hell shall not prevail against 
us." Our banner of triumph, and on it is inscribed, 
" Victory through our Lord Jesus Christ ! " and we 
mean to plant that banner on every hilltop, and wave 
it at the gate of heaven. 



THE GLORIOUS MARCH. 



309 



With Christ to lead us, we need not fear. I will 
not underrate the enemy. They are a tremendous 
host. They come on with acutest strategy. Their 
weapons by all the inhabitants of darkness have been 
forged in furnaces of everlasting fire. We contend 
not with flesh and blood, but with principalities, and 
powers, and spiritual wickedness in high places ; but, 
if God be for us, who can be against us ? Come on, 
ye troops of the Lord ! Fall into line ! Close u^ the 
ranks ! On, through burning sands and over frozen 
mountain-tops, until the whole earth surrenders to 
God. He made it ; He redeemed it ; He shall have it. 
They shall not be trampled with hoofs, they shall not 
be cut with sabers, they shall not be crushed with 
wheels, they shall not be cloven with battle-axes, but 
the marching, and the onset, and the victory, will be 
none the less decisive for that. 

With Christ to lead us, and heaven to look down 
upon us, and angels to guard us, and martyr spirits 
to bend from their thrones, and the voice of God to 
bid us forward into the combat, our enemies shall fly 
like chaff in the whirlwind, and all the towers of 
heaven ring because the day is ours. . 



CHAPTER XXXI. 

SHAMS IN RELIGION. 

The world wants a religion that will work into all 
the ^circumstances of life. We do not want a new 
religion, but the old religion applied in all possible 
directions. 

Yonder is a river with steep and rocky banks, and 
it roars like a young Niagara as it rolls on over its 
rough bed. It does nothing but talk about itself all 
the way from its source in the mountain to the place 
where it empties into the sea. The banks are so 
steep the cattle cannot come down to drink. It does 
not run one fertilizing rill into the adjoining field. 
It has not one grist mill or factory on either side. It 
sulks in wet weather, with chilling fogs. No one 
cares when that river is born among the rocks, and 
no one cares when it dies into the sea. But yonder 
is another river, and it mosses its banks with the 
warm tides, and it rocks with floral lullaby the water 
lilies asleep on its bosom. It invites herds of cattle 
and flocks of sheep and coveys of birds to come 
there and drink. It has three grist mills on one side 
and six cotton factories on the other. It is the 
wealth of two hundred miles of luxuriant farms. 
The birds of heaven chanted when it was born in 
the mountains, and the ocean shipping will press in 
from the sea to hail it as it comes down to the Atlan- 
tic coast. The one river is a man who lives for him- 

310 



SHAMS IN RELIGION. 



self. The other river is a man who lives for others. 
I think you will agree with me in the statement that 
the great want of this world is more practical reli- 
gion. We want practical religion to go into all mer- 
chandise. It will supervise the labeling of goods. 
It will not allow a man to say that a thing was made 
in one factory when it was made in another. It will 
not allow the merchant to say that watch was man- 
ufactured in Geneva, Switzerland, when it was man- 
ufactured in Massachusetts. It will not allow the 
merchant to say that wine came from Madeira when 
it came from California. Practical religion will walk 
along by the store shelves, and tear off all the tags 
that make misrepresentation. It will not allow the 
merchant to say that is pure coffee, when dandelion 
root and chicory and other ingredients go into it. 
It will not allow him to say that is pure sugar, when 
there are in it sand and ground glass. 

When practical religion gets its full swing in the 
world it will go down the street, and it will come to 
that shoe store and rip off the fictitious soles of many 
a fine-looking pair of shoes, and show that it is paste- 
board sandwiched between the sound leather. And 
this practical religion will go right into a grocery 
store, and it will pull out the plug of all the adulterated 
syrups, and it will dump into the ash-barrel, in front 
of the store, the cassia bark that is sold for cinnamon 
and the brickdust that is sold for cayenne pepper; 
and it will shake out the Prussia blue from the tea 
leaves, and it will sift from the flour plaster of Paris 
and bonedust and soapstone, and it will, by chemical 
analysis, separate the one quart of Ridge wood water 
from the few honest -drops of cow's milk, and it will 
throw out the live animalcules from the brown sugar. 



312 SHAMS IN RELIGION. 

There has been so much adulteration of articles of 
food that it is an amazement to me that there is a 
healthy man or woman in America. Heaven only 
knows what they put into the spices and into the 
sugars and into the butter, and into the apothecary 
drug. But chemical analysis and the microscope 
have made wonderful revelations. The Board of 
Health in Massachusetts analyzed a great amount of 
what was called pure coffee, and found in it not one 
particle of coffee. In England there is a law that for- 
bids the putting of alum in bread. The public authori- 
ties examined fifty-one packages of bread, and found 
them all guilty. The honest physican, writing a pre- 
scription, does not know but that it may bring death 
instead of health to his patient, because there may be 
one of the drugs weakened by a cheaper article, and 
another drug may be in full force, and so the pre- 
scription may have just the opposite effect intended. 
Oil of wormwood warranted pure from Boston was 
found to have forty-one per cent, of resin and alcohol 
and chloroform. Scammony is one of the most valu- 
able medical drugs. It is very rare, very precious. 
It is the sap or the gum of a tree or a bush in Syria. 
The root of the tree is exposed ; an incision is made 
into the root, and then shells are placed at this inci- 
sion to catch the sap or the gum, as it exudes. It is 
very precious, this scammony. But the peasant mixes 
it with a cheaper material ; then it is taken to Aleppo, 
and the merchant there mixes it with a cheaper mate- 
rial ; then it comes on to the wholesale druggist in 
London or New York, and he mixes it with a cheaper 
material ; then it comes to the retail druggist, and he 
mixes it with a cheaper material, and by the time 
the poor sick man gets it into his bottle, it is ashes and 



SHAMS IN RELIGION. 



313 



chalk and sand, and some of what has been called 
pure scammony after analysis, has been found to be 
no scammony at all. 

Now, practical religion will yet rectify all this. It 
will go to those hypocritical professors of religion 
who got a " corner " in corn and wheat in Chicago 
and New York, sending prices up and up until they 
were beyond the reach of the poor, keeping these 
breadstuffs in their own hands, or controlling them 
until the prices going up and up and up, they were, 
after a while, ready to sell, and they sold out, making 
themselves millionaires in one or two years — trying 
to fix the matter up with the Lord by building a 
church, or a university, or a hospital — deluding them- 
selves with the idea that the Lord would be so 
pleased with the gift He would forget the swindle. 
Now, as such a man may not have any liturgy in 
which to say his prayers, I will compose for him one 
which he practically is making : " O Lord, we, by 
getting a ' corner ' in breadstuffs, swindled the people 
of the United States out of ten million dollars, and 
made suffering all up and down the land, and we 
would like to compromise the matter with Thee. 
Thou knowest it was a scaly job, but then it was 
smart. Now, here we compromise it. Take one per 
cent, of the profits, and with that one per cent, you 
can build an asylum for these poor miserable raga- 
muffins of the street, and I will take a yacht and go 
to Europe, forever and ever. Amen ! " 

Ah ! my friends, if a man hath gotten his estate 
wrongfully and he build a line of hospitals and uni- 
versities from here to Alaska, he cannot atone for it. 
After a while, this man who has been getting a " cor- 
ner " in wheat, dies, and then Satan gets a " corner " 



3H 



SHAMS IN RELIGION. 



in him. He goes into a great, long Black Friday. 
There is a "break" in the market. According to 
Wall Street parlance, he wiped others out, and now 
he is himself wiped out. No collaterals on which to 
make a spiritual loan. Eternal defalcation. 

But this practical religion will not only rectify all 
merchandise ; it will also rectify all mechanism, and 
all toil. A time will come when a man will work as 
faithfully by the job as he does by the day. You say 
when a thing is slightingly done : " Oh, that was 
done by the job." You can tell by the swiftness or 
slowness with which a hackman drives whether he is 
hired by the hour or by the excursion. If he is hired 
by the hour he drives very slowly, so as to make as 
many hours as possible. If he is hired by the excur- 
sion, he whips up the horses so as to get around and 
get another customer. All styles of work have to be 
inspected. Ships inspected, horses inspected, ma- 
chinery inspected. Boss to watch the journeyman. 
Capitalist coming down unexpectedly to watch the 
boss. Conductor of a city car sounding the punch 
bell to prove his honesty as a passenger hands to him 
a clipped nickel. All things must be watched and 
inspected. Imperfections in the wood covered with 
putty. Garments warranted to last until you put 
them on the third time. Shoddy in all kinds of cloth- 
ing. Chromos. Pinchbeck. Diamonds for a dollar 
and a half. Bookbinding that holds on until you 
read the third chapter. Spavined horses, by skillful 
dose of jockeys, for several days made to look spry. 
Wagon tires poorly put on. Horses poorly shod. 
Plastering that cracks without any provocation, and 
falls off. Plumbing that needs to be plumbed. Im- 
perfect car wheel that halts the whole train with a 



• 



SHAMS IN RELIGION. 



315 



hot box. So little practical religion in the mech- 
anism of the world. I tell you, my friends, the law of 
man will never rectify these things. It will be the 
all-pervading influence of the practical religion of 
Jesus Christ that will make the change for the 
better. 

Yes, this practical religion will also go into agri- 
culture, which is proverbially honest, but needs to 
be rectified, and it will keep the farmer from sending 
to the New York market, veal that is too young to 
kill, and when the farmer farms on shares, it will 
keep the man who does the work from making his 
half three-fourths, and it will keep the farmer from 
building his post and rail fence on his neighbor's 
premises, and it will make him shelter his cattle in 
the winter storm, and it will keep the old elder from 
working on Sunday afternoon in the new ground 
where nobody sees him. And this practical religion 
will hover over the house, and over the barn, and 
over the field, and over the orchard. 

Yes, this practical religion of which I speak, will 
come into the learned professions. The lawyer will 
feel his responsibility in defending innocence and 
arraigning evil, and expounding the law, and it will 
keep him from charging for briefs he never wrote, 
and for pleas he never made, and for percentages he 
never earned, and from robbing widow and orphan, 
because they are defenceless. Yes, this practical re- 
ligion will come into the physician's life, and he will 
feel his responsibility as the conservator of the public 
health, a profession honored by the fact that Christ 
Himself was a physician. And it will make him hon- 
est, and when he does not understand a case, he will 
say so, not trying to cover up lack of diagnosis with 



316 



SHAMS IN RELIGION. 



ponderous technicalities, or send the patient to a 
reckless drugstore, because the apothecary happens 
to pay a percentage on the prescriptions sent. And 
this practical religion will come to the school-teacher, 
making her feel her responsibility in preparing our 
youth for usefulness, and for happiness, and for honor, 
and will keep her from giving a sly box to a dull 
head, chastising him for what he can not help, and 
sending discouragement all through the after years 
of a lifetime. This practical religion will also come 
to the newspaper men, and it will help them in the 
gathering of the news, and it will help them in set- 
ting forth the best interests of society, and it will 
keep them from putting the sins of the world in 
larger type than its virtues, and its mistakes than its 
achievements, and it will keep them from misrepre- 
senting interviews with public men, and from start- 
ing suspicions that never can be allayed, and will 
make them stanch friends of the oppressed instead of 
the oppressor. 

Yes, this religion, this practical religion, will come 
and put its hand on what is called good society, ele- 
vated society, successful society, so that people will 
have their expenditures within their income, and 
they will exchange the hypocritical " not at home " 
for the honest explanation " too tired," or " too busy 
to see you," and will keep innocent reception from 
becoming intoxicated conviviality, and it will by 
frank manners and Christian sentiment drive out that 
creature with sharp-toed shoe and tightly bandaged 
limb, and elbows drawn back, and idiotic talk, and 
infinitesimal cane, and sickening swagger, born in 
America, but a poor copy of a foppish Englishman, 
the nux vomica of modern society, commonly called 
the " Dude." 



SHAMS IN RELIGION. 



317 



Yea, there is great opportunity for missionary- 
work in what are called the successful classes of 
society. It is no rare thing now to see a fashionable 
woman intoxicated in the street, or the rail-car, or 
the restaurant. The number of fine ladies who drink 
too much is increasing. Perhaps you may find her 
at the reception in most exalted company, but she 
has made too many visits to the wine room, and now 
her eye is glassy, and after a while her cheek is un- 
naturally flushed, and then she falls into fits of excru- 
ciating laughter about nothing, and then she offers 
sickening flatteries, telling some homely man how 
well he looks, and then she is helped into the car- 
riage, and by the time the carriage gets to her home, 
it takes the husband and the coachman to get her up 
the stairs. The report is, She was taken suddenly ill 
at a german. Ah ! no. She took too much cham- 
pagne, and mixed liquors, and got drunk. That 
was all. 

Yea, this practical religion will have to come in and 
fix up the marriage relation in America. There are 
members of churches who have too many wives and 
too many husbands. Society needs to be expurgated, 
and washed, and fumigated, and Christianized. We 
have missionary societies to reform the Five Points 
in New York, and Bedford Street, Philadelphia, and 
Shoreditch, London, and the Brooklyn docks ; but 
there is need of an organization to reform much that 
is going on in Beacon Street, aud Madison Square, 
and Rittenhouse Square, and West End, and Brook- 
lyn Heights, and Brooklyn Hill. The trouble is that 
people have an idea they can do all their religion on 
Sunday with hymn-book, and prayer-book, and lit- 
urgy, and some of them sit in church rolling up their 



318 



SHAMS IN RELIGION. 



eyes as though they were ready for translation, when 
their Sabbath is bounded on all sides by an incon- 
sistent life, and while you are expecting to come out 
from under their arms the wings of an angel, there 
come out from their forehead the horns of a beast. 

There has got to be a new departure in religion. I 
do not say a new religion. Oh, no ; but the old re- 
ligion brought to new appliances. In our time we 
have had the daguerreotype, and the ambrotype, and 
the photograph ; but it is the same old sun, and these 
arts are only new appliances of the old sunlight. So 
this glorious Gospel is just what we want to photo- 
graph the image of God on one soul, and daguer- 
reotype it on another soul. Not a new Gospel, but 
the old Gospel put to new work. In our time we 
have had the telegraphic invention, and the tele- 
phonic invention, and the electric light invention; 
but they are all the children of old electricity, an ele- 
ment that the philosophers have a long while known 
much about. So this electric Gospel needs to flash 
its light on the eyes, and ears, and souls of men, and 
become a telephonic medium to make the deaf hear; 
a telegraphic medium to dart invitation and warning 
to all nations ; an electric light to illumine the 
Eastern and Western hemispheres. Not a new Gos- 
pel, but the old Gospel doing a new work. 

Now you say, " That is a very beautiful theory, 
but is it possible to take one's religion into all the 
avocations and business of life ? " Yes, and I will 
give you some specimens. Medical doctors who 
took their religion into everyday life : Dr. John 
Abercrombie, of Aberdeen, the greatest Scottish 
physician of his day, his book on " Diseases of the 
Brain and Spinal Cord," no more wonderful than his 
book on " The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings," 



SHAMS IN RELIGION. 



319 



and often kneeling- at the bedside of his patients to 
commend them to God in prayer. Dr. John Brown, 
of Edinburgh, immortal as an author, dying- recently 
under the benediction of the sick of Edinburgh ; 
myself remembering him as he sat in his study in 
Edinburgh talking to me about Christ, and his hope 
of heaven. And a score of Christian family physi- 
cians in Brooklyn just as good as they were. 

Lawyers who carried their religion into their pro- 
fession : Lord Cairns, the queen's adviser for many 
years, the highest legal authority in Great Britain — 
Lord Cairns, every summer in his vacation preaching 
as an evangelist among the poor of his country. 
John McLean, Judge of the Supreme Court of the 
United States, and Prpsident of the American Sun- 
day-School Union, feeling more satisfaction in the 
latter office than in the former. And scores of 
Christian lawyers as eminent in the Church of God 
as they are eminent at the bar. 

Merchants who took their religion into everyday 
life : Arthur Tappan, derided in his day because he 
established that system by which we come to find 
out the commercial standing of business men, starting 
that entire system, derided for it then, himself, as I 
knew him well, in moral character A 1. Monday 
mornings inviting to a room in the top of his store- 
house the clerks of his establishment, asking them 
about their worldly interests and their spiritual 
interests, then giving out a hymn, leading in a prayer, 
giving them a few words of good advice, asking 
them what church they attended on the Sabbath, 
what the text was, whether they had any special 
troubles of their own. Arthur Tappan. I never 
heard his eulogy pronounced. I pronounce it now. 
And other merchants just as good. William E. 



320 



SHAMS IN RELIGION. 



Dodge, in the iron business, Moses H. Grinnell, in 
the shipping business, Peter Cooper, in the glue bus- 
iness. Scores of men just as good as they were. 

Farmers who take their religion into their occupa- 
tion : Why, this minute their horses and wagons 
stand around all the meeting-houses in America. 
They began this day by a prayer to God, and when 
they get home at noon, after they have put their 
horses up, will offer a prayer to God at the table, 
seeking a blessing, and this summer there will be in 
their fields not one dishonest head of rye, not one 
dishonest ear of corn, not one dishonest apple. Wor- 
shiping God to-day away up among the Berkshire 
Hills, or away down amid the lagoons of Florida, or 
away out amid the mines of Colorado, or along the 
banks of the Passaic and the Raritan. 

Mechanics who took their religion into their oc- 
cupations : James Brindley, the famous millwright, 
Nathaniel Bowditch, the famous ship chandler, Elihu 
Burritt, the famous blacksmith, and hundreds and 
thousands of strong arms which have made the ham- 
mer and the saw and the adze and the drill and the 
axe sound ' in the grand march of our national in- 
dustries. 

Give your heart to God and then fill your life with 
good works. Consecrate to Him your store, your 
shop, your banking house, your factory, and your 
home. They say no one will hear it. God will hear 
it. That is enough. You hardly know of any one 
else than Wellington, as connected with the victory 
at Waterloo ; but he did not do the hard fighting. 
The hard fighting was done by the Somerset cavalry 
and the Ryland regiments, and Kempt's infantry, and 
the Scotch Grays, and the Life Guards. Who cares, 
if only the day was won ? 



SHAMS IN RELIGION. 



321 



In the latter part of the last century, a girl in 
England became a kitchen maid in a farmhouse. 
She had many styles of work and much hard work. 
Time rolled on, and she married the son of a weaver 
of Halifax. They were industrious, they saved 
money enough after a while to build them a home. 
On the morning of the day when they were to enter 
that home, the young wife arose at four o'clock, 
entered the front door-yard, knelt down, consecrated 
the place to God, and there made this solemn vow : 
" O Lord, if Thou wilt bless me in this place, the 
poor shall have a share of it." Time rolled on and a 
fortune rolled in. Children grew up around them, 
and they all became affluent. One, a Member of 
Parliament, in a public place declared that his success 
came from that prayer of his mother in the door- 
yard. All of them were affluent, — four thousand 
hands in their factories. They built dwelling houses 
for laborers at cheap rents, and where they were 
invalid, and could not pay, they had the houses for 
nothing. One of these sons came to this country, 
admired our parks, went back, bought land, opened 
a great public park, and made it a present to the city 
of Halifax, England. They endowed an orphanage, 
they endowed two almshouses. All England has 
heard of the generosity and the good works of the 
Crossleys. Moral : Consecrate to God your small 
means and your humble surroundings, and you will 
have larger means and grander surroundings. "God- 
liness is profitable unto all things, having promise, of 
the life that now is, and of that which is to come." 
" Have faith in God by all means, but remember that 
faith without works is dead." 



21 



CHAPTER XXXII. 



THE BEAUTY OF RELIGION. 

The crystal is the star of the mountain ; it is the 
queen of the cave ; it is the ear-drop of the hills ; it 
finds its heaven in the diamond. Among all the 
pages of natural history there is no page more inter- 
esting to me than the page crystallographic. 

Religion is superior to the crystal in exactness. 
That shapeless mass of crystal against which you 
accidentally dashed your foot is laid out with more 
exactness than any earthly city. There are six styles 
of crystalization, and all of them divinely ordained. 
Every crystal has mathematical precision. God's 
geometry reaches through it, and it is a square or it 
is a rectangle or it is a rhomboid or in some way it 
hath a mathematical figure. . 

Now religion beats that in the simple fact that spir- 
itual accuracy is more beautiful than material accu- 
racy. God's attributes are exact. God's law exact. 
God's decrees exact. God's management of the 
world exact. Never counting wrong, though He 
counts the grass-blades and the stars and the sands 
and the cycles. His providences never dealing with 
us perpendicularly when those providences ought to 
be oblique, nor lateral when they ought to be verti- 
cal. Everything in our life arranged without any 
possibility of mistake. Each life a six-sided prism. 
Born at the right time ; dying at the right time. 
There are no " happen-so's " in our theology. 

322 



RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE. 



THE BEAUTY OF RELIGION. 325 

If I thought this was a slipshod universe I would 
go crazy. God is not an anarchist. Law, order, 
symmetry, precision, a perfect square, a perfect rec- 
tangle, a perfect rhomboid, a perfect circle. The 
edge of God's robe of government never frays out. 
There are no loose screws in the world's machinery. 
It did not just happen that Napoleon was attacked 
with indigestion at Borodino so that he became incom- 
petent for the day. It did not just happen that John 
Thomas, the missionary, on a heathen island, waiting 
for an outfit and orders for another missionary tour, 
received that outfit and those orders in a box that 
floated ashore, while the ship and the crew that car- 
ried the box were never heard of. The barking of 
F. W. Robertson's dog, he tells us, led to a line of 
events which brought him from the army into the 
Christian ministry, where he served God with world- 
renowned usefulness. It did not merely happen so. 
I believe in a particular providence. I believe God's 
geometry may be seen in all our life more beautifully 
than in crystallography. Job was right. " The crys- 
tal can not equal it." 

Just after my arrival in Philadelphia* to take a pas- 
torate I was called to a house of great sorrow. The 
family had been to Cape May for summering. The 
son of the household had been drowned in a pond 
not far from the beach. As I entered the afflicted 
home and the lad prepared for the sepulchre lay in 
one room, there rang through the hall the wailing of 
the father and the mother, a grief appalling and inde- 
scribable. The parents said they could not forgive 
themselves, because they had changed their plans for 
the summer and had not gone to the White Mount- 
ains as they had proposed, and had gone to Cape May. 



326 



THE BEAUTY OF RELIGION. 



" Oh," I said to them, " do not say, ' 1 wish we had 
gone to the mountains instead of going to Cape 
May ; ' do you not think God has arranged all this ? 
You cannot understand now the mercy of it, but 
trust Him ; there are no accidents ; the God who 
arranges all the affairs of your life arranged the death 
of that boy." Do not say, as I have often heard some 
of you say, " Oh, if I had not gone here and if I had 
not gone there, this would not have occurred, and 
that would not have occurred ! " Things are not at 
loose ends. Precision, accuracy. Job was right: 
" The crystal cannot equal it." 

Religion is superior to the crystal in transparency. 
We know not when or by whom glass was first dis- 
covered. Beads of it have been found in the tomb 
of Alexander Severus. Vases of it are brought up 
from the ruins of Herculaneum. There are female 
adornments made out of it three thousand years ago 
— those adornments found now attached to the mum- 
mies of Egypt. A great many commentators believe 
that my text means glass. What would we do with- 
out the crystal ? The crystal in the window to keep 
out the storm', and let in the day — the crystal over 
the watch defending its delicate machinery, yet 
allowing us to see the hour — the crystal of the teles- 
cope by which the astronomer brings distant worlds 
so near he can inspect them. Oh, the triumphs of 
the crystals in the celebrated windows of Rouen and 
Salisbury ! 

But there is nothing so transparent in a crystal as 
in our holy religion. It is a transparent religion. 
You put it to your eye and you see man — his sin, his 
soul, his destiny. You look at God and you see 
something of the grandeur of His character. It is a 



THE BEAUTY OF RELIGION. 



327 



transparent religion. Infidels tell us it is opaque. 
Do you know why they tell us it is opaque ? It is 
because they are blind. The natural man receiveth 
not the things of God because they are spiritually 
discerned. There is no trouble with the crystal j the 
trouble is with the eyes which try to look through it. 
We pray for vision, Lord, that our eyes might be 
opened. When the eye-salve cures our blindness 
then we find that religion is transparent. 

It is a transparent Bible. All the mountains of 
the Bible come out ; Sinai, the mountain of the law ; 
Pisgah, the mountain of prospect ; Olivet, the 
mountain of instruction ; Calvary, the mountain of 
sacrifice. All the rivers of the Bible come out — 
Hidekel, or the river of paradisaical beauty ; Jordan, 
or the river of holy chrism ; Cherith, or the river of 
prophetic supply ; Nile, or the river of palaces ; and 
the pure river of life from under the throne clear as 
crystal. While reading this Bible after our eyes 
have been touched by grace, we find it all transpa- 
rent, and the earth rocks, now with crucifixion agony 
and now with judgment terror, and Christ appears 
in some of His two hundred and fifty-six titles, as far 
as I can count them — the bread, the rock, the cap- 
tain, the commander, the conqueror, the star, and on 
and beyond any capacity of mind to rehearse them. 
Transparent religion ! 

The providence that seemed dark before becomes 
pellucid. Now you find God is not trying to put you 
down. Now you understand why you lost that child, 
and why you lost your property ; it was to prepare 
you for eternal treasures. And why sickness came ; 
it being the precursor of immortal juvenescence; 
And now you understand why they lied about you, 



328 THE BEAUTY OF RELIGION. 

and tried to drive you hither and thither. It was to 
put you in the glorious company of such men as Ig- 
natius, who, when he went out to be destroyed by 
the lions, said : I am the wheat, and the teeth of 
the wild beasts must first grind me before I can be- 
come pure bread for Jesus Christ ; " or the company 
of such men as Polycarp, who, when standing in the 
midst of the amphitheater waiting for the lions to 
come out of their cave and destroy him, and the peo- 
ple in the galleries jeering and shouting, " The lions 
for Polycarp," replied : " Let them come on," and 
then stooping down toward the cave where the wild 
beasts were roaring to get out, " Let them come on." 
Ah, yes, it is persecution to put you in glorious com- 
pany ; and while there are many things that you will 
have to postpone to the future world for explanation, 
I tell you that it is the whole tendency of your reli- 
gion to unravel and explain and interpret and illu- 
mine and irradiate. 

Religion surpasses the crystal in its beauty. 

That lump of crystal is put under the magnifying 
glass of the crystallographer, and he sees in it indes- 
cribable beauty — snowdrift and splinters of hoar-frost 
and corals and wreaths and stars and crowns and 
castellations of conspicuous beauty. The fact is that 
crystal is so beautiful that I can think of but one thing 
in all the universe that is so beautiful, and that is the 
religion of the Bible. No wonder this Bible rep- 
resents that religion as the daybreak, as the apple 
blossoms, as the glitter of a king's banquet. It is the 
joy of the whole earth. 

People talk too much about their cross, and not 
enough about their crown. Do you know the Bible 
mentions a cross but twenty-seven times while it 



THE BEAUTY OF RELIGION. 329 

mentions a crown eighty times ? Ask that old man 
what he thinks of religion. He has been a close ob- 
server. He has been culturing an aesthetic taste. 
He has seen the sunrises of a half century. He has 
been an early riser. He has been an admirer of 
cameos, and corals, and all kinds of beautiful things. 
Ask him what he thinks of religion, and he will tell 
you, "It is the most beautiful thing I ever saw. The 
crystal can not equal it." 

Beautiful in its symmetry. When it presents God's 
character it does not present Him as having love like 
a great protuberance on one side of His nature, but 
makes that love in harmony with His justice — a love 
that will accept all those who come to Him, and a 
justice that will by no means clear the guilty. Beau- 
tiful religion in the sentiment it implants ! Beautiful 
religion in the hope it kindles ! Beautiful religion in 
the fact that it proposes to garland, and enthrone, 
and emparadise an immortal spirit ! Solomon says 
it is a lily. Paul says it is a crown. The Apocalypse 
says it is a fountain kissed of the sun. Ezekiel says 
it is a foliage cedar. Christ says it is a bridegroom 
come to fetch home a bride. While Job takes up a 
whole vase of precious stones — the topaz, and the 
sapphire, and the chrysoprase — and he takes out of this 
beautiful vase just one crystal and holds it up until it 
gleams in the warm light of the eastern sky, and he 
exclaims, "The crystal can not equal it." 

Oh, it is not a stale religion, it is not a stupid re- 
ligion, it is not a toothless hag, as some seem to have 
represented it ; it is not a Meg Merrilies with shriv- 
eled arm come to scare the world. It is the fairest 
daughter of God, heiress of all His wealth. Her 
cheek the morning sky; her voice the music of the 



330 THE BEAUTY OF RELIGION. 

south wind ; her step the dance of the sea. Come 
and woo her. The Spirit and the Bride say come, 
and whosoever will, let him come. Do you agree 
with Solomon, and say it is a lily? Then pluck it, 
and wear it over your heart. Do you agree with 
Paul, and say it is a crown? Then let this hour be 
your coronation. Do you agree with the Apocalypse, 
and say it is a springing fountain ? Then come and 
slake the thirst of your soul. Do you believe 
with Ezekiel, and say it is a foliaged cedar ? Then 
come under its shadow. Do you believe with Christ 
and say it is a bridegroom come to fetch home a 
bride ? Then strike hands with your Lord, the king, 
while I pronounce you everlastingly one. Or if you 
think with Job that it is a jewel, then put it on your 
hand like a ring, on your neck like a bead, on 
your forehead like a star, while looking into the 
mirror of God's Word you acknowledge "The crystal 
cannot equal it." 

Religion is superior to the crystal in its transfor- 
mations. 

The diamond is only a crystalization of coal. Car- 
bonate of lime rises till it becomes calcite or ara- 
gonite. Red oxide of copper crystalizes into cubes 
and oetahedrons. Those crystals which adorn our 
persons, and our homes, and our museums, have only 
been resurrected from forms that were far from lus- 
trous. Scientists for ages have been examining these 
wonderful transformations. But I tell you in the 
Gospel of the Son of God there is a more wonderful 
transformation. Over souls, by reason of sin black 
as coal and hard as iron, God by His comforting 
grace stoops and says : " They shall be Mine in the 
day when I make up My jewels." 



THE BEAUTY OF RELIGION. 



331 



"What," say you, " will God wear jewelry?" If 
He wanted it He could make the stars of heaven His 
belt and have the evening cloud for the sandals of 
His feet ; but he does not want that adornment. He 
will not have that jewelry. When God wants jew- 
elry He comes down and digs it out of the depths 
and darkness of sin. These souls are all crystaliza- 
tions of mercy. He puts them on and He wears 
them in the presence of the whole universe. He 
wears them on the hand that was nailed, over the 
heart that was pierced, on the temples that were 
stung. " They shall be mine," saith the Lord, " in 
the day when I make up my jewels." Wonderful 
transformation ! The carbon becomes a solitaire ! 

Now, I have no liking for those people who are 
always enlarging in Christian meetings about their 
early dissipation. Do not go into the particulars, 
my brothers. Simply say you were sick, but make 
no display of your ulcers. The chief stock in trade 
of some ministers and Christian workers seems to 
be their early crimes and dissipations. The num- 
ber of pockets you picked and the number of 
chickens you stole make very poor prayer-meeting 
rhetoric. Besides that, it discourages other Christian 
people who never got drunk or stole anything. But 
it is pleasant to know that those who were farthest 
down have been brought highest up. Out of infernal 
serfdom into eternal liberty. Out of darkness into 
light. From coal to the solitaire. " The crystal can 
not equal it." 

But, my friends, the chief transforming power ©f 
the Gospel will not be seen in this world and not 
until heaven breaks upon the soul. When that light 
falls upon the soul then you will see the crystals. 



332 



THE BEAUTY OF RELIGION. 



Oh, what a magnificent setting for these jewels of 
eternity ! 

"Oh," says some one, putting his hand over his 
eyes, " can it be that I who have been in so much sin 
and trouble will ever come to those crystals ? " 

Yes, it may be — it will be. Heaven we must have, 
whatever 'else we have or have not, and we have 
come here to get it. " How much must I pay for 
it?" you say. You will pay for it just as much as 
the coal pays to become the diamond. In other 
words, nothing. The same Almighty power that 
makes the crystal in the mountain will change your 
heart, which is harder than stone, for the promise is, 
" I will take away your stony heart, and I will give 
you a heart of flesh." 

" Oh," says some one, " it is just the doctrine I 
want ; God is to do everything and I am to do 
nothing." My brother, it is not the doctrine you 
want. The coal makes no resistance. It hears the 
resurrection voice in the mountain, and it comes to 
crystalization, but your heart resists. The trouble 
with you, my brother, is, the coal wants to stay coal. 
I do not ask you to throw open the door and let 
Christ in. I only ask that you stop bolting it and 
barring it. 

O my brother, you must either kill sin or sin will 
kill you. It is no wild exaggeration when I say that 
any man or woman that wants to be saved may be 
saved. Tremendous choice. A thousand people are 
choosing this moment between salvation and destruc- 
tion, between light and darkness, between heaven 
and hell, between charred ruin and glorious crys- 
talization. 



THE AL HAM BRA 

[The Court of L,ions] 



CHAPTER XXXIII. 



RELIGION AN ANTISEPTIC. 

Grace is like salt in its beauty. In Galicia, among 
the mines of salt, there are two hundred and eighty 
miles of underground passages. Down in those salt 
mines there are chapels, and cathedrals, and theaters, 
and halls of reception, and the altars are of crystal, 
and the columns are of crystal, and the ceiling is of 
crystal. When the emperor comes and the princes, 
all this is lighted up with torches, and the scene is 
indescribable for beauty, as the emperor and the 
mighty men of his realm walk through, and some 
of them worship in the chancels, and others are 
entertained in the theaters, and all the floor, all the 
pillars, all the ceilings are of crystal. But why 
should I go so far to tell you of the beauty of salt 
when you can take a morning train and gO to the 
salt mines in a few hours ? You have it three times 
a day upon your table. 

It is beautiful to the naked eye, but put under the 
microscope, you see the stars, and the splinters, and 
the shafts, and the bridges of fire glint of the sun. 
Salt has all the beauty of water foam and snowflake, 
with durability added. No human skill hath ever 
put in Alhambra or St. Peter's such marvelous 
beauty as God hath put in one crystal of salt. 
An angel would need to take all of time with an 
infringement upon eternity, to sketch the beauty 

335 



336 RELIGION AN ANTISEPTIC. 

of that which you sometimes cast aside as of no 
importance. 

So I have to tell you that the grace of God is 
beautiful and beautifying. Have you never seen a 
life illumined by it ? Have you never seen a soul 
comforted by it ? Have you never seen a character 
grandly constructed through it? I have seen it 
smooth the wrinkles of care from the brow. I have 
seen it seemingly change the aged into the young. I 
have seen it lift the stooped shoulder and put sparkle 
into the dull eye. It is beautifying in its results. It 
is grand and glorious in its influence. Solomon 
described its anatomical effect when he said : " It is 
marrow to the bones." 

Of course, I refer now to a healthy religion, not 
that kind which sits for three hours on a gravestone 
reading Hervey's " Meditations among the Tombs " 
— a kind of religion which always thrives best in a 
bad state of the liver ; but a religion such as Christ 
preached, the healthiest thing in all the earth, good 
for the body as well as good for the soul, for it calms 
the pulses and it soothes the nerves, and it quiets the 
spleen, and it is a physical reinvigoration. Many a 
man has felt it. I suppose when the grace of God 
has triumphed in all the earth disease will be ban- 
ished, and that a man one hundred years of age will 
come into the house, and say : " I am very tired, and 
it is time for me to go," and without one phgsical 
pang heaven will have him. 

When I was living in Philadelphia there was an 
aged bank president; he was somewhere in the , 
nineties. At the close of the business of the day, he ' 
came home, lay down on the sofa, and said to his 
daughter : " My time has come, and I must go away 



RELIGION AN ANTISEPTIC. 



337 



from you." " Why," she said, "father, are you sick? 
shall I send for a doctor?" "Oh, no," he replied, 
" I am not sick, but the time has come for me to go. 
You have it L put in the morning papers about my 
death, so that they will not expect me in business 
circles." And instantly he ceased to breathe. That 
was beautiful — that was a glorious transition from the 
world. And the time will come when men will leave 
the world without a pang, 

The grace of God is going to do just as much for 
the bodies of men as it does for the souls of men. 
But I think the power of religion is chiefly seen in 
the soul. It takes that which is hard and cold and 
repulsive and casts it out. It makes a man all over 
again. It takes his pride and his selfishness and his 
worldliness and chains them — chains them fast so 
that they can move around with very small sweep- 
for they are chained. 

Go all through the underground falls of Weilitzka 
and through the underground kingdoms of Holstadt 
and show me anything so beautiful, so grandly 
beautiful, as this eternal crystal. It throws a beauty 
over the heart, and a beauty over the life. Christ 
comes into the soul and casts on it the glow of a 
summer garden, as he says: "I am the rose of 
Sharon and the lily of the valley." And then He 
comes and throws all over the life and the heart the 
beauty of a spring morning, as He cries out: " I am 
the light of the world." Oh, is there in all the earth, 
is there in all the heavens anything so beautiful as 
the grace of God ? 

Grace is like salt in the fact that it is a necessity 
of life. Beasts and men die without it. What are 
those paths across the Western prairie ? They have 



338 RELIGION AN ANTISEPTIC. 

been made by the deer and buffalo coming to and 
going from the salt licks. All chemists, all physiolo- 
gists, all physicians will tell you that salt is an abso- 
lute necessity for physical health and life. Without 
it we soon die. And I came to understand also that 
this grace of God is an absolute necessity. I hear 
people talk of it as though this religion were a mere 
adornment, a shoulder-strap decorating a soldier, a 
frothy, light dessert after the chief banquet has 
passed, something to be tried after calomels and mus- 
tard plasters have failed, but in ordinary circum- 
stances of no especial importance — only the jingling 
of the bells on the horse's neck while he draws the 
load, but in no way helping him to draw it. Now I 
denounce that style of religion. Religion, while it 
is an adornment, is the first and the last necessity of 
an immortal nature. I must have it, you must have 
it, or we cannot live. 

You know how a man would soon perish if he took 
no salt with his food. The energies would flag, the 
lungs would struggle with the air, slow fevers would 
crawl through the brain, the heart would flutter, and 
the life would be gone. And that is what is the mat- 
ter with a great many people who are dying in their 
souls. They take none of this salt of divine grace. 
They have never tried it. They do not want it. 
Weaker and weaker will they get in the spiritual life, 
until after a while they will be stretched out on the 
bier of death. Coffin him in a groan. Hearse him in 
a sigh. Throw a wreath of nightshade on the casket. 
Kindle no lamp at the head or the foot, but rather, 
set up the expired torches of the foolish virgins 
whose lamps went out. Salt an absolute necessity 
for the life of the body ; the grace of God an absolute 



RELIGION AN ANTISEPTIC. 



339 



necessity for the life of the soul. Oh, that it might 
thunder in our ears to-day, " Except ye be born again 
ye cannot, ye cannot see the kingdom of God." 

We have got to have more faith in this Gospel, in 
its power to save all classes of people, not only those 
high up, but those low down, not only the wise, but 
the ignorant — all classes. It is going to- regenerate 
society. While we sit in holy places to-day, how 
many thousands there are who have no Sabbath. 
They pass down these streets. They know not it is 
the Sabbath, except that it gives them more oppor- 
tunity for dissipation and wicked hilarity, and more 
time for sin. They have got to be brought under the 
power of this Gospel. It is an abundant Gospel. The 
Christ that saved you will save them. 

"Oh," says some one out there, "if I am to be saved 
I will be saved, and if I am to be lost I will be lost." 
You misrepresent the Gospel, my brother. Do not 
say that. There is something for you to do. Strive 
to enter in at the straight gate. Take the kingdom of 
heaven by violence. 

This grace is also like salt in its preservative qual- 
ity. 

You know that salt absorbs the moisture of food, 
and so food is preserved. Salt is the great anti-putre- 
factive of the world. Everybody knows that. Ex- 
perimenters in the preservation of food have tried 
sugar and smoke and air-tight jars, and everything ; 
but as long as the world stands Christ's remark will 
be suggestive : " Salt is good." And this grace of 
God is to be the preservative of laws, of constitutions, 
of government. Why is it that the United States 
Government and the British Government have stood 
so long? While there has been corruption often in 

22 



340 



RELIGION AN ANTISEPTIC. 



high places, there have been good men always in the 
front. Take the grace of God away from a nation, 
and you work its destruction. It cannot live with- 
out it. 

So a great deal of modern philosophy. What is 
the matter with it ? The grace of God has gone out 
of it, and it putrefies and rots. What our schools of 
learning, what our institutions of science want now 
is not more Leyden jars, more galvanic batteries, 
more spectroscopes, more philosophic apparatus. 
Oh, no. What is most wanted is the grace of God 
to teach our men of learning that the God of the 
universe is the God of the Bible. Is it not strange 
that with all their magnificent sweeps of the tele- 
scopes they have never seen the morning star of 
Jesus? or having been so long studying about light 
and heat, they have never seen and felt the light and 
heat of the sun of righteousness that has risen on the 
world with healing in His wings ? O mv friends, the 
Gospel of the grace of God is the only anti-putrefac- 
tive among the nations. Take that away, you take 
their life away. Everything on earth is tending to 
decay and death. This is the preserving quality. 
" Salt is good." 



CHAPTER XXXIV. 



THE SPICERY OF RELIGION. 

All theologians agree in making Solomon a type 
of Christ, and in making the Queen of Sheba a type 
of every truth-seeker ; and I shall take the responsi- 
bility of saying that all the spikenard, and cassia, and 
frankincense which the Queen of Sheba brought to 
King Solomon is mightily suggestive of the sweet spi- 
ces of our holy religion. Christianity is not a collection 
of sharp technicalities, and angular facts, and chro- 
nological tables, and dry statistics. Our religion is 
compared to frankincense and to cassia, but never to 
nightshade. It is a bundle of myrrh. It is a dash of 
holy light. It is a sparkle of cool fountains. It is an 
opening of opaline gates. It is a collection of spices. 
Would God that we were as wise in taking spices to 
our Divine King as Queen Balkis was wise in taking 
the spices to the earthly Solomon. 

The fact is, that the duties and cares of this life, 
coming to us from time to time, are stupid often, and 
inane, and intolerable. Here are men who have been 
battering, climbing, pounding, hammering for twenty 
years, forty years, fifty years. One great, long 
drudgery has their life been. Their faces anxious, 
their feelings benumbed, their days monotonous. 
What is necessary to brighten up that man's life, and 
to sweeten that acid disposition, and to put sparkle 
into the man's spirits? The spicery of our holy re- 

34i 



342 



THE SPICERY OF RELIGION. 



ligion. Why, if between the losses of life there 
dashed a gleam of an eternal gain ; if between the 
betrayals of life there came the gleam of the undying 
friendship of Christ ; if in dull times in business we 
found ministering spirits flying to and fro in our 
office, and store, and shop, everyday life, instead of 
being a stupid monotone, would be a glorious inspi- 
ration, penduluming between calm satisfaction and 
high rapture. 

How any woman keeps house without the religion 
of Christ to help her, is a mystery to me. To have 
to spend the greater part of one's life, as many 
women do, in planning for the meals, and stitching 
garments that will soon be rent again, and deploring 
breakages, and supervising tardy subordinates, and 
driving off dust that soon again will settle, and doing 
the same thing day in and day out, and year in and 
year out, until the hair silvers, and the back stoops, 
and the spectacles crawl to the eyes, and the grave 
breaks open under the thin sole of the shoe — oh, it is 
a long monotony ! But when Christ comes to the 
drawing-room, and comes to the kitchen, and comes 
to the nursery, and comes to the dwelling, then how 
cheery become all womanly duties. She is never 
alone now. Martha gets through fretting and joins 
Mary at the feet of Jesus. All day long Deborah is 
happy because she can help Lapidoth ; Hannah, be- 
cause she can make a coat for young Samuel ; Miriam, 
because she can watch her infant brother ; Rachel, 
because she can help her father water the stock ; the 
widow of Sarepta because the cruse oil is being re- 
plenished. 

O, woman, having in your pantry a nest of boxes 
containing all kinds of condiments, why have you not 



THE SPICERY OF RELIGION. 343 

tried in your heart and life the spicery of our holy 
religion ? " Martha ! Martha ! thou art careful and 
troubled about many things ; but one thing is need- 
ful, and Mary hath chosen that good part which shall 
not be taken away from her." 

I must confess that a great deal of the religion of 
this day is utterly insipid. There is nothing piquant 
or elevating about it. Men and women go around 
humming psalms in a minor key, and culturing 
melancholy, and their worship has in' it more sighs 
than raptures. We do not doubt their piety. Oh, 
no. But they are sitting at a feast where the cook 
has forgotten to season the food. Everything is flat 
in their experience and in their conversation. Emanci- 
pated from sin, and death, and hell, and on their way 
to a magnificent heaven, they act as though they 
were trudging on toward an everlasting Botany Bay. 
Religion does not seem to agree with them. It seems 
to catch in the windpipe, and become a strangula- 
tion instead of an exhilaration. 

All the infidel books that have been written, from 
Voltaire down to Herbert Spencer, have not done so 
much damage to our Christianity as lugubrious 
Christians. Who wants a religion woven out of the 
shadows of the night ? Why go growling on your 
way to celestial enthronement? Come out of that 
cave, and sit down in the warm light of the Son of 
Righteousness. Away with your odes to melancholy 
and Hervey's " Meditations among the Tombs." 

" Then let our songs abound, 
And every tear be dry ; 
We're marching through Emmanuel's ground 
To fairer worlds on high." 

I have to say also, that we need to put more spice 
and enlivenment in our religious teachings; whether it 



344 



THE SPICERY OF RELIGION. 



be in the prayer-meeting, or in the Sabbath-school, 
or in the Church. We ministers need more fresh 
air and sunshine in our lungs, and our hearts, and our 
heads. Do you wonder that the world is so far from 
being converted when you find so little vivacity in 
the pulpit and in the pew ? We want, like the Lord, 
to plant in our sermons and exhortations more lilies 
of the field. We want few rhetorical elaborations, 
and fewer sesquipedalian words; and when we talk 
about shadows, we do not want to say adumbration ; 
and when we mean queerness, we do not want to talk 
about idiosyncrasies; or if a stitch in the back, we do 
not want to talk about lumbago ; but, in the plain ver. 
nacular of the great masses, preach that Gospel which 
proposes to make all men happy, honest, victorious, 
and free. In other words, we want more cinnamon 
and less gristle. Let this be so in all the different 
departments of work to which the Lord calls us. 
Let us be plain. Let us be earnest. Let us be com- 
mon-sensical. When we talk to the people in a ver- 
nacular they can understand, they will be very glad 
to come and receive the truth we present. Would 
to God that Queen Balkis would drive her spice- 
laden dromedaries into all our sermons and prayer- 
meeting exhortations. 

More than that, we want more life and spice in our 
Christian work. The poor do not want so much to 
be groaned over as sung to. With the bread and 
medicines, and the garments you give them, let there 
be an accompaniment of smiles and brisk encourage- 
ment. Do not stand and talk to them about the 
wretchedness of their abode, and the hunger of their 
looks, and the hardness of their lot. Ah ! they know 
it better than you can tell them. Show them the 



THE SPICERY OF RELIGION. 



345 



bright side of the thing, if there be any bright side. 
Tell them good times will come. Tell them that for 
the children of God there is immortal rescue. Wake 
them up out of their stolidity by an inspiring laugh, 
and while you send in practical help, like the Queen 
of Sheba also send in the spices. 

There are two ways of meeting the poor. One is 
to come into their house with a nose elevated in dis- 
gust, as much as to say : "I dont't see how you live 
here in this neighborhood. It actually makes me 
sick. There is that bundle — take it, you poor miser- 
able wretch, and make the most of it." Another 
way is to go into the abode of the poor in a manner 
which seems to say : "The blessed Lord sent me. 
He was poor himself. It is not more for the good 
I am going to try to do you than it is for the good 
you can do me." Coming in that spirit, the gift will 
be as aromatic as the spikenard on the feet of Christ, 
and all the hovels on that alley will be fragrant with 
the spice. 

We need more spice and enlivenment in our church- 
music. Churches sit discussing whether they shall 
have choirs, or precentors, or organs, or bass-viols, 
or cornets ; I say, take that which will bring out the 
most inspiring music. If we had half as much zeal 
and spirit in our churches as we have in the songs of 
our Sabbath-schools, it would not be long before the 
whole earth would quake with the coming God. 
Why, nine-tenths of the people in church do not sing ; 
or they sing so feebly that the people at their elbows 
do not know they are singing. People mouth and 
mumble the praises of God : but there is not more 
than one out of a hundred who makes a joyful noise 
unto the Rock of our Salvation. Sometimes, when 



34^ 



THE SPICERY OF RELIGION. 



the congregation forgets itself, and is all absorbed in 
the goodness of God, or the glories of heaven, I get 
an intimation of what church-music will be a hun- 
dred years from now, when the coming generation 
shall wake up to its duty. 

Soft music, long-drawn-out music, is appropriate 
for the drawing-room, and appropriate for the con- 
cert ; but St. John gives an idea of the sonorous and 
resonant congregational singing appropriate for 
churches when, in listenirig to the temple service of 
heaven, he says : "I heard a great voice, as the voice 
of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters, 
and as the voice of mighty thunderings. Hallelujah, 
for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth." 

Join with me in a crusade, giving me not only your 
hearts, but the mighty uplifting of your voices, and 
I believe we can, through Christ's grace, sing five 
thousand souls into the kingdom of Christ. An 
argument, they can laugh at ; a sermon, they may 
talk down ; but a five-thousand voiced utterance of 
praise to God is irresistible. Would that Queen 
Balkis would drive all her spice-laden dromedaries 
into our church-music. 

Religion is sweetness, and perfume, and spikenard, 
and saffron, and cinnamon, and cassia and frankin- 
cense, and all sweet spices together. " Oh," you 
say, " I have not looked at it as such. I thought 
it was a nuisance ; it had for me a repulsion ; I 
held my breath as though it were a mal odor ; I 
have been appalled at its advance ; I have said, if 
I have any religion at all, I want to have just as lit- 
tle of it as is possible to get through with it." 

Oh, what a mistake you have made, my brother. 
The religion of Christ is a present and everlasting 



THE SPICERY OF RELIGION. 



347 



redolence. It counteracts all trouble. Just put it on 
the stand beside the pillow of sickness. It catches 
in the curtains, and perfumes the stifling air. It 
sweetens the cup of bitter medicine, and throws a 
glow on the gloom of the turned lattice. It is a 
balm for the aching side, and a soft bandage for the 
temple stung with pain. It lifted Samuel Rutherford 
into a revelry of spiritual delight, while he was in 
physical agonies. It helped Richard Baxter until, in 
the midst of such a complication of diseases as per- 
haps no other man ever suffered, he wrote "The Saint's 
Everlasting Rest." And it poured light upon John 
Bunyan's dungeon — the light of the shining gate of 
the shining city. And it is good for rheumatism, and 
for neuralgia, and for low spirits, and for consump- 
tion ; it is the catholicon for all disorders. Yes, it will 
heal all your sorrows. 

A widowed mother, with her little child, went 
West, hoping to get better wages there ; and she was 
taken sick, and died. The overseer of the poor got 
her body and put it in a box, and put it in a wagon, 
and started down the street toward the cemetery at 
full trot. The little child — the only child — ran after 
it through the streets, bare-headed, crying ; "Bring 
me back my mother ! bring me back my mother !" 
And it was said that as the people looked on and saw 
her crying after that which lay in the box in the 
wagon — all she loved on earth — it is said the whole 
village was bathed in tears. 

And that is what a great many of you are doing — 
chasing the dead. Dear Lord, is there no appease- 
ment for all this sorrow that I see about me ? Yes, 
the thought of resurrection and reunion far beyond 
this scene of struggle and tears. " They shall hunger 



348 



THE SPICERY OF RELIGION. 



no more, neither thirst any more, neither shall the 
sun light on them, nor any heat ; for the Lamb which 
is in the midst of the throne shall lead them to living 
fountains of water, and God shall wipe away all tears 
from their eyes." Across the couches of your sick, 
and across the graves of your dead, I fling this 
shower of sweet spices. Queen Balkis, driving up 
to the pillared portico of the house of cedar, carried 
no such pungency of perfume as exhales to-day from 
the Lord's garden. It is peace. It is sweetness. It 
is comfort. It is infinite satisfaction, this Gospel I 
commend to you. 

Some one could not understand why an old Ger- 
man Christian scholar used to be always so calm, and 
happy, and hopeful, when he had so many trials, and 
sicknesses, and ailments. A man secreted himself in 
the house. He said: "I mean to watch this old 
scholar and Christian ; " and he saw the old Christian 
man go to his room and sit down on the chair beside 
the stand, and open the Bible and begin to read. He 
read on and on, chapter after chapter, hour after 
hour, until his face was all aglow with the tidings 
from heaven, and when the clock struck twelve, he 
arose and shut his Bible, and said : "Blessed Lord, 
we are on the same old terms yet. Good-night. 
Good-night." Oh, you sin-parched and you trouble- 
pounded, here is comfort, here is satisfaction. Will 
you come and get it ? I can not tell you what the 
Lord offers you hereafter so well as I can tell you 
now. "It doth not yet appear what we shall be." 



CHAPTER XXXV. 



LIVE CHURCHES. 

A live church is prompt in all its financial engage- 
ments. Every religious institution has monetary re- 
lations. The Bank of England ought to be no more 
faithful in the discharge of its obligations than ought 
the Church of Jesus Christ. If a church standing in 
any community fails to pay its debts, it becomes an 
injury to the place where it stands, instead of a bless- 
ing. All religious institutions ought to be an example 
to the world for faithfulness in the discharge of 
monetary obligations. There are a thousand things 
that prayer will not do. Prayer will not paint a 
church, prayer will not purchase a winter's coal, 
prayer will not pay an insurance, prayer will not sup- 
port the institutions of religion. A prayer never 
goes heaven high unless it goes pocket deep. All 
our supplication in behalf of religious institutions 
amounts to nothing, unless we are willing, so far as 
God has prospered us, to contribute for their sup- 
port. 

I might at this point say that there are many 
churches of Jesus Christ in our land that are utterly 
failing in this direction. There are a great many of 
the ministers of religion half starved to death. 
" Thank you," said a minister from the far West, 
when some friends from the East sent him a few 
extra dollars ; " thank you sir." Until that money 

349 



350 LIVE CHURCHES. ■ 

came we had no meat in our house for three months, 
and our children this winter have worn their summer 
clothes." There is no more ghastly suffering in the 
United States to-day than is to be found in some of 
the parsonages of this country. I denounce the nig- 
gardliness of many of the churches of Jesus Christ, 
keeping some men who are very apostles for piety 
and consecration, in circumstances where they are 
always apologetic, and have not that courage which 
thev would have could the}" stand in the presence of 
people whom they knew were faithful in the dis- 
charge of their financial duties to the Christian 
Church. Alas ! for those men of whom the world is 
not worthy. Do you know the simple fact that in 
the United States to-day the salary of ministers aver- 
ages less than six hundred dollars, and when you con- 
sider that some of the salaries are very large, you, as 
business men. will immediately see to what great 
straits many of God's noblest servants are this day 
reduced. A live church will look after all its finan- 
cial interests, and be as prompt in the meeting of those 
obligations as any bank in all the cities. 

A live church will be punctual in its attendance. 
If in such a church the services begin at half-past ten 
o'clock in the morning, the people will not come at a 
quarter of eleven. If in such a church the services 
begin at half-past seven o'clock in the evening, the 
people will not come at a quarter of eight. In many 
churches there is great tardiness. The fact is, some 
people are always late. They were born too late, 
and I suppose they will die too late. It is poor in- 
spiration to a Christian minister, when in preliminary 
exercises, half the people seated in their pews are 
looking around to see the other half come in. It is 



LIVE CHURCHES. 



351 



very confusing to a minister of religion when, during 
the opening exercises, there is the rustling of dresses 
through the aisle, and the slamming of doors at the 
entrance. 

There ought to be no opening, preliminary exer- 
cises. There is a grand delusion in the churches of 
Jesus Christ on this subject. There must be no pre- 
liminary exercises. The very first word of the invo- 
cation is as important as anything that may come 
after. Scripture lesson, the voice of God to man, 
while a sermon mav be only the voice of man to man. 
And happy is that church where all the worshipers 
are present at the beginning of the services. I know 
there is a difference in timepieces, but a live church 
goes by railroad time, and everybody in every com- 
munity knows what that is. No man goes to take 
the limited express train to Washington at five min- 
utes past ten o'clock if the train started at ten. In 
many of the households of Christendom, every Sab- 
bath morning the family might well sing that old 
hymn : 

" Early, my God, without delay, 
I haste to seek thy face.'' 

Yes, I go further, and tell you that in every live 
church all the people take part in the exercises. A 
stranger can tell by the way the first hymn starts, 
whether it is a live church. It is a sad thing when 
the music comes down in a cold drizzle from the or- 
gan loft, and freezes on the heads of the silent people 
beneath. It is an awful thing for a hymn to start and 
then find itself lonely and unbefriended, wandering 
around about, after a while lost amid the arches. 
That is not melody to the Lord. In heaven they all 
sing, although some sing not half as well as .others. 



352 



LIVE CHURCHES. 



The Methodist Church has sung its way around the 
earth. A man on fire with the Gospel, as John Wes- 
ley preached it, has taken his place in the far West, 
and on Sabbath morning has come out in front of his 
log cabin and sung : 

" A charge to keep I have, 
A God to glorify." 

And they heard it on the other side the forest, and 
they gathered around the doorstep, and after a while 
a church grew up, and they had a great revival, and 
all the wilderness heard the voice of God. A church 
that can sing can do anything that ought to be done. 
In this great battle for God let us take the Bible in 
one hand and the hymn book in the other, on the 
way to triumphs without end, and to pleasures that 
never die. Sing ! 

A live church will have a flourishing Sabbath- 
school. It is too late in the history of the church to 
argue the benefit of Sabbath-schools. A Sabbath- 
school is not a supplement to the church; it is 
its right arm. "Oh," you say, " there are stupid 
churches that have Sabbath-schools." Yes, and the 
Sabbath-schools are stupid, too. It is a dead mother 
holding a dead child. But where Sabbath after Sab- 
bath, a superintendent, and teachers, and children 
come, their faces aglow with enthusiasm, entering 
with great heart into the services, and then retiring at 
home feeling that they have been on a mount of trans- 
figuration — that church will be a live church. 

But while we have the children of the refined and 
the educated and the cultured in our churches, I de- 
plore the fact that there are such vast multitudes who 
get none of the benediction. What will become of 
the 70,000 destitute children in New York? It is a 



LIVE CHURCHES. 



353 



tremendous question. What will become of the 
thousands of destitute children in Brooklyn? If we 
do not act upon them they will act upon us. If we 
do not Christianize them they will heathenize us. It 
is a question not more for every Christian than for 
every patriot, and every philanthropist, and every 
statesman. Oh, if we could gather them all together, 
what a scene of hunger and wretchedness and des- 
pair and death. 

If you could see those little feet on the broad road 
to death, which, through Christian charity, ought to 
be pressing the narrow path of life ; if you could 
hear those voices in blasphemy, which ought to be 
singing the praises of God ; if you could see those 
hearts, which at that age ought not to be soiled with 
one impure thought, already become the sewers of 
iniquity ; if you could see those little ones sacrificed 
on the altar of every iniquitous passion, and baptized 
with fire from the lava of the pit, your soul would 
recoil, crying : "Avaunt, thou dream of hell." 

They are coming up. They will not always be 
boys and girls. They are coming up into the men 
and women of this country. That spark of iniquity 
that might be put out now with one drop of the water 
of life, will become a conflagration, destroying every 
green thing that God ever planted in the soul. That 
which ought to be the temple of the Holy Ghost will 
become a scarred and blasted ruin, every light 
quenched, and every altar in the dust. That petty 
thief who yesterday slipped into your store and took 
a piece of cloth from the counter, will become the 
highwayman of the forest, or the burglar at midnight, 
picking the lock of your money safe and blowing up 
your store to hide the villainy. 

23 



354 



LIVE CHURCHES. 



A great army, they come on with staggering step 
and bloodshot eye, and drunken hoot to take the bal- 
lot box and hurrah at the elections. The rough- 
handed ruffianism of the country, if we do not look 
out, will after a while have more power than the 
tender hand of sobriety. Men bloated, and with the 
signature of sin burned in from the top of their fore- 
heads to the bottom of their chins, will look honest 
men out of countenance. Moral corpses, that ought 
to be buried a hundred feet deep to keep them from 
poisoning the air, will rot in the face of the sun at 
noonday. Industry in her plain frock will be des- 
pised, and thousands of men unwilling to work will 
wander about with their hands on their hips, saying: 
"The world owes me a living," when it owes them 
the penitentiary, Oh, what a power there is in in- 
iquity when unrestrained and unblanched. It goes 
on concentring and deepening and widening, rolling 
ahead with every triumph of desolation, drowning 
like surges, scorching like flames, crushing like rocks. 

What are you going to do with them — of this vast 
multitude of children marching up to take posses- 
sion of this land? "Oh," you say, "it's only a child, 
it's only a child." Ah ! that child has covered up in 
the ashes of its body a spark of immortality which 
will blaze on with untold splendor long after yonder 
sun has died of old age, and all the countless worlds 
that glitter at night shall have been swept off by the 
Almighty's breath as the small dust of a threshing 
floor. Yet you say it is only a child. 

A live church will have commodious and appro- 
priate architecture. A log church may do in a place 
where people live in log cabins, but in cities where 
people have commodious and beautiful apartments a 



LIVE CHURCHES. 355 

church that is not commodious and is not beautiful, 
is a moral nuisance ; it is an insult to God and an in- 
sult to man. 

A live church must be a soul-saving church. The 
Gospel of Jesus Christ must be preached in it. A 
church may be built around one man who shall read 
an essay, the church may be built around one man 
who shall preach something else than the Gospel, and 
there may be a large congregation ; but after a while, 
the man dies, and the church dies. That church has 
a very poor foundation that is built on two human 
shoulders. 

I could tell you of a church in the city of Boston 
that was more largely attended some thirty years ago 
than any other church in that city. Where is it to- 
day ? Utterly gone out of existence. A man stood 
there who preached everything but the Gospel of 
Jesus Christ. He died, and the church died. We 
want a church built on the Rock of Ages, Jesus 
Christ, the Lord. That is the church that will goon 
decade after decade, century after century — a church 
standing like Rowland Hill's old church, meaning the 
Gospel all the way through. I was at the celebra. 
tion of, I think, the ninetieth year of that church. 
The man who founded it had long ago gone into the 
skies. 

"Oh," say some, "the Gospel of Jesus Christ allows 
such small opportunity for man's intellect." Does 
it? A man of that kind came to Rowland Hill, of 
whom I just spoke, and said : "Mr. Hill, I have quit 
the ministry because I am not willing to hide my 
talents." Mr. Hill said : "I have known you a long 
while, my friend, and I think the sooner you hide 
3 7 0ur talents the better." Oh, there is no such field 



356 



LIVE CHURCHES. 



for a man's intellect and a man's heart as the Gospel 
ministry. Have you powers of analysis? Exhaust 
them here. Have you irresistible logic ? Grapple 
with St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans. Have you 
powers of pathos ? Exhibit the love of Jesus Christ. 
Have you great imagination ? Dwell upon the Psalms 
of David, or John's apocalyptic vision. Are you dis- 
posed to bold thinking? Follow Ezekiel's wheel full 
of eyes, and hear through his chapters the rush of 
the wings of the seraphim. Oh, come and preach 
this Gospel ; if not in pulpits, in the store, in the fac- 
tory, in the shop, in the street, in the banking-house, 
everywhere. Each of you called to preach this 
Gospel somewhere, a voice from the throne saying 
this day : " Woe unto you if you preach not this 
Gospel." 




MUSIC. 



CHAPTER XXXVI. 



MUSIC IN WORSHIP. 

The best music has been rendered under trouble. 
The first duet that I know anything of was given by 
Paul and Silas when they sang praises to God and 
the prisoners heard them. The Scotch Covenanters, 
hounded by the dogs of persecution, sang the psalms 
of David with more spirit than they have ever since 
been rendered. All our churches need arousal on 
this subject. Those who can sing must throw their 
souls into the exercise, and those who cannot sing 
must learn how, and it shall be heart to heart, voice to 
voice, hymn to hymn, anthem to anthem, and the 
music shall swell jubilant with thanksgiving and 
tremulous with pardon. Music seems to have been 
born in the soul of the natural world. The om- 
nipotent voice with which God commanded the 
world into being seems to linger yet with its majesty 
and sweetness, and you hear it in the grain field, in 
the swoop of the wind amid the mountain fastnesses, 
in the canary's warble, and the thunder shock, in the 
brook's tinkle and the ocean's pasan. There are soft 
cadences in nature, and loud notes, some of which 
we cannot hear at all, and others that are so terrific 
that we cannot appreciate them. 

The animalculse have their music, and the spicula 
of hay and the globule of water are as certainly 
resonant with the voice of God as the highest 

359 



3 6o 



MUSIC IN WORSHIP. 



heavens in which the armies of the redeemed cele- 
brate their victories. When the breath of the flower 
strikes the air, and the wing of the firefly cleaves it, 
there is sound and there is melody ; and as to those 
utterances of nature which seem harsh and over- 
whelming, it is as when you stand in the midst of a 
great orchestra, and the sound almost rends your ear 
because you are too near to catch the blending of the 
music. So, my friends, we stand too near the desolat- 
ing storm and the frightful whirlwind to catch the 
blending of the music ; but when that music rises to 
where God is, and the invisible beings who float 
above us, then I suppose the harmony is as sweet as 
it is tremendous. 

My chief interest is in the music of the Bible. The 
Bible, like a great harp with ^innumerable strings, 
swept by the fingers of inspiration, trembles with it. 
So far back as the fourth chapter of Genesis you find 
the first organist and harper — Jubal. So far back as 
the thirty-first chapter of Genesis you find the first 
choir. All up and down the Bible you find sacred 
music — at weddings, at inaugurations, at the treading 
of the wine press. Can you imagine the harmony 
when these white-robed Levites, before the symbols 
of God's presence, and by the smoking altars, and the 
candlesticks that sprang upward and branched out 
like trees of gold, and under the wings of the cheru- 
bim, chanted the one hundred and thirty-sixth Psalm 
of David ? You know how it was done. One part 
of that great choir stood up and chanted, " Oh ! give 
thanks unto the Lord, for He is good!" Then the 
other part of the choir, standing in some other part 
of the temple, would come in with the response : 
" For His mercy endureth forever." Then the first 



MUSIC IN WORSHIP. 



361 



part would take up the song again, and say, 4 ' Unto 
Him who only doeth great wonders." The other part 
of the choir would come in with the overwhelming 
response, " For His mercy endureth forever," until 
in the latter part of the song, the music floating back- 
ward and forward, harmony grappling with harmony, 
every trumpet sounding, every bosom heaving, one 
part of this great white-robed choir would lift the 
anthem, " Oh ! give thanks unto the God of heaven," 
and the other part of the Levite choir would come 
in with the response : " For His mercy endureth 
forever." 

Now, my friends, how are we to decide what is 
appropriate, especially for church music ? There may 
be a great many differences of opinion. In some of 
the churches they prefer a trained choir ; in others, 
the old style precentor. In some places they prefer 
the melodeon, the harp, the cornet, the organ ; in 
other places they think these things are the invention 
of the devil. Some would have a musical instrument 
played so loud you cannot stand it, and others would 
have it played so soft you cannot hear it. Some 
think a musical instrument ought to be played only 
in the interstices of worship, and then with indescri- 
bable softness ; while others are not satisfied unless 
there be startling contrasts and staccato passages that 
make the audience jump, with great eyes and hair on 
end, as from a vision of the Witch of Endor. But, 
while there may be great varieties of opinion in 
regard to music, it seems to me that the general spirit 
of the Word of God indicates what ought to be the 
great characteristic of church music. 

And I remark, in the first place, a prominent char- 
acteristic ought to be adaptiveness to devotion. 



362 



MUSIC IN WORSHIP. 



Music that may be appropriate for a concert-hall, or 
the opera-house, or the drawing-room, may be shock- 
ing in church. Glees, madrigals, ballads, may be as 
innocent as psalms in their places. But church music 
has only one design, and that is devotion, and that 
which comes with the toss, the song, and the display 
of an opera-house is a hindrance to the worship. 
From such performances we go away saying, " What 
splendid execution ! Did you ever hear such a 
soprano ? Which of those solos did you like the bet- 
ter?" When, if we had been rightly wrought upon, 
we would have gone away saying, "Oh, how my soul 
was lifted up in the presence of God while they were 
singing that first hymn ! I never had such rapturous 
views of Jesus Christ as my Saviour, as when they 
were singing that last doxology." 

My friends, there is an everlasting distinction be- 
tween music as an art and music as a help to devo- 
tion. Though a Schumann composed it, though a 
Mozart played it, though a Sontag sang it, away with 
it if it does not make the heart better and honor 
Christ. Why should we rob the programmes of 
worldly gayety, when we have so many appropriate 
songs and tunes composed in our own day, as well as 
that magnificent inheritance of Church psalmody 
which has come down fragrant with the devotions of 
other generations — tunes no more worn out than they 
were when our great-grandfathers climbed up on 
them from the church pew to glory ? 

'And in those days there were certain tunes mar- 
ried to certain hymns, and they have lived in peace a 
great while, these two old people, and we have no 
right to divorce them. " What God hath joined 
together let no man put asunder." Born, as we have 



MUSIC IN WORSHIP. 



363 



been, amid this great wealth of Church music, 
augmented by the compositions of artists in our own 
day, we ought not to be tempted out of the sphere 
of Christian harmony, and try to seek unconsecrated 
sounds. It is absurd for a millionaire to steal. 

I remark also, that correctness ought to be a char- 
acteristic of Church music. While we all ought to 
take part in this service, with perhaps a few excep- 
tions, we ought, at the same time, to culture ourselves 
in this sacred art. God loves harmony, and we 
ought to love it. There is no devotion in a howl. 

Another characteristic must be spirit and life. 
Music ought to rush from the audience like the water 
from a rock — clear, bright, sparkling. If all the 
other part of the Church service is dull, do not have 
the music dull. 

With so many thrilling things to sing about, away 
with all drawling and stupidity. There is nothing 
that makes me so nervous as to sit in a pulpit and 
look off on an audience with their eyes three-fourths 
closed, and their lips almost shut, mumbling the 
praises of God. People do not sleep at a coronation ; 
do not let us sleep when we come to a Saviour's 
coronation. 

Again, Church music must be congregational. 
This opportunity must be brought down within the 
range of the whole audience. A song that the wor- 
shipers can not sing is of no more use to them than a 
sermon in Choctaw. 

Let us wake up to this duty. Let us sing alone, 
sing in our families, sing in our schools, sing in our 
churches. 

" Gloria in Excelsis " is written over many organs. 
Would that by our appreciation of the goodness of 



364 MUSIC IN WORSHIP. 

God, and the mercy of Christ, and the grandeur of 
heaven, we could have " Gloria in Excelsis" written 
over all our souls. " Glory be to the Father, and to 
the Son, and to the Holy Ghost ; as it was in the 
beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without 
end." 



CHAPTER XXXVII. 



ABOLITION OF SUNDAY. 

While the evangelical denominations put especial 
emphasis upon the sanctity of the Sabbath, I am glad 
to know that the wisdom of resting one day in the 
seven is almost universally acknowledged. Men have 
found out that they can do more work in six days 
than they can in seven. The world has found out 
that the fifty-two days of rest are not a subtraction, 
but an addition. It has been demonstrated in all de- 
partments. Lord Castlereagh thought he could work 
his brain three hundred and sixty-five days in the 
year, and he broke down and committed suicide; 
and Wilberforce said in regard to him: "Poor Castle- 
reagh ! this comes from non-observance of the Sab- 
bath." A prominent merchant of New York said : 
"I should long ago have been a maniac but for the 
observance of the Sabbath." The nerves, the brain, 
the muscles, the bones, the entire physical, mental, 
and moral constitution cry out for Sabbatic rest. 

What is true of man is true of beast. Travelers 
have found that they come sooner to their destination 
if they stop one day in the seven. What is the mat- 
ter of some of these horses attached to the street cars 
as the poor creatures go stumbling and staggering 
on? They are robbed of the Sabbatic rest. In the 
days of old, when the sheep and the cattle were driven 
from the far West to the sea-coast, it was found out 

365 



3 66 



ABOLITION OF SUNDAY. 



by positive test that those drovers got sooner to the 
seaboard who stopped one day in seven on the way. 
They came sooner to the seaboard than those who 
drove right on. The fishermen off the banks of New- 
foundland have experimented in this matter, and 
they find that they catch more fish in the year when 
they observe the Sabbath than in the year when they 
do not observe the Sabbath. 

When I asked a Rocky Mountain locomotive en- 
gineer, as I was riding with him, "Why do you switch 
off your locomotive on a side track and take an- 
other?" — as I saw he was about to do — "it seems to 
be a straight route." He replied: "Oh, we have to 
let the locomotive stop and cool off, or the machinery 
would very soon break down ! " The manufacturers 
of salt were told if they allowed their kettles to cool 
one day in seven they would have immense repairs 
to make ; but the experiment was made; and the con- 
trast came, and it was found that those manufacturers 
of salt who allowed the kettles to cool once a week 
had less repairs to make than those who kept the 
furnaces in full blast, and the kettles always hot. 
What does all this mean ? It means that the intel- 
lectual man, and dumb beast, and dead machinery, 
cry out for the Lord's day. 

A manufacturer declared that the goods his men 
manufactured in the early part of the week, and right 
after the Sabbath rest, were always better than the 
goods manufactured in the latter part of the week, 
and when his men were tired. The Sabbath comes, 
and it soothes the nerves, and it puts out the fires of 
anxiety which have burned all the week. The fact 
is, we are seven-day clocks, and we have to be wound 
up once a week or we will run down into the grave. 



ABOLITION OF SUNDAY. 



367 



The Sabbath is a savings bank into which we gather 
up our resources of physical and mental strength to 
draw on all the week. That man gives a mortgage 
, to disease and death who works on the Sabbath, and 
at the most unexpected moment the mortgage will 
be foreclosed and the soul ejected from the premises. 
Every gland, every cell, every globule, every finger- 
nail, cry out : "Remember the Sabbath day to keep 
it holy !" 

A London banker says : " I came to London thirty 
years ago, and I have had a great deal of observation, 
and I have noticed that the bankers who went to 
their places of business on the Sabbath, and attended 
to affairs, and settled up their accounts, failed, and 
without one exception." A Boston merchant says: 
"I have observed a long while, and I have noticed 
when out on the Long Wharf, merchants kept their 
men busy loading vessels on Sunday, and at work 
from morn until night on the sacred day — I noticed 
all those merchants came to nothing, and their chil- 
dren came to nothing." ""Gentlemen," said a mer- 
chant, although he is a man of the world — "gentle- 
men, it don't pay to work on Sunday." 

While the flail, and the axe, and the yardstick have 
not been able to destroy the Sabbath, and the vast 
majority of people, from sanitary reasons, have about 
concluded it is best to rest on the Sabbath, there is 
an attempt to destroy the Lord's day, on one side by 
the grog-shops, and on the other side by secular 
amusements. I say it is time for all good citizens, 
whether they are temperance men or not — it is time 
for all honest citizens, and all men who have a pride 
in their homes, to rise up and put down this infamous 
business, at any rate one day of the week. Certainly, 



3 68 



ABOLITION OF SUNDAY. 



if they have full swing Monday, Tuesday, Wednes- 
day, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, they ought to 
give us at least one day of rest from this awful evil 
which is abroad amid the nations. 

Then, there is an effort being made by secular 
amusements to destrov our Sabbaths. In many of 
the cities, all the, or nearly all the, places of theatric 
and operatic entertainment are open. There are 
thousands of pens busy trying to write down the 
Christian Sabbath, and it is a question whether we 
are going to have pluck and grit and consecration 
enough to hand down to our children the Sabbath 
we got from our ancestors. 

I am opposed to all these invasions of the Sabbath, 
because they run against the divine enactment. God 
says: "If thou turn away thy foot from doing thy 
pleasure on my holy day, thou shalt walk upon the 
high places." What does He mean by "doing thy 
pleasure" ? He means secular amusement. A man 
was telling me how he was affrighted when, during 
the time of an earthquake, he heard the bellowing of 
the cattle in the field, and even the barnyard fowl 
screamed in horror. I tell you that it was in time of 
earthquake, and when the mountains were full of fire, 
that God sent forth the enactment : "Remember 
the Sabbath day to keep it holy," the agonies of na- 
ture emphasizing the divine injunction. 

"Oh," says some, "haven't you any regard for the 
people's rights?" Yes. I believe in the people hav- 
ing their rights, but has not the Lord any rights? 
You govern your family, and the Governor rules the 
State, and the President rules the United States. 
Do you really think the Lord Almighty, who made 
the heavens and the earth, has a right to rule the 



ABOLITION OF SUNDAY. 369 

universe ? Had He a right to make the enactment, 
"Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy" ? 
There is no higher court than that. I declare it now, 
in the presence of all the people, whether it be a pop- 
ular or an unpopular thing to say, the people have 
no rights except those which the Lord God Almighty 
gives them. 

I am opposed to all these infractions of the Sabbath, 
because they are attempting to introduce in this 
country the Parisian Sunday. 

I was awakened in Paris by a great racket in the 
street, and I rushed to the window to see what was 
the matter. I said to some one : "What is the mat- 
ter?" I said to another, "What is the matter ?" "Oh," 
they replied, "it is Sunday !" Sunday ! All the ve- 
hicles rushing hither and thither. People talking at 
the height of their voices, and in the most boisterous 
manner. The Champs Elysees one great mass, one 
great mob of pleasure-seekers. Balloons flying ; par- 
rots chattering ; footballs rolling ; Punch and Judy 
shows in scores of places, each with a shouting audi- 
ence ; hand-organs and cymbals, and all styles of 
racket, musical and unmusical. Sunday ! Sunday ! 
And then as the day passed on toward night I stood 
and saw the excursionists come home, fagged-out 
men, women, and children, a great Gulf Stream of 
fatigue, and irritability, and wretchedness. A 
drunken Fourth of July instead of a Christian Sun- 
day. How would you like to have such a Sunday 
as that in this country ? 

Compare it with the Christian Sabbath in one of 
our best cities. At day-dawn a holy silence comes 
down. The business man tarries longer on the pil- 
low, because there are no store doors to open, no 



^4 



37° ABOLITION OF SUNDAY. 

hard work to be engaged in. The family tarry 
longer around the table. There is no rushing off to 
business. After awhile there is a song sung. After 
awhile there is a prayer offered, and after awhile 
about ten o'clock, there is a long procession church- 
ward, and there they praise God for His goodness, 
and they contribute to the poor, the suffering, and 
the wandering. Which Sunday do you like the 
best? 

I will tell you in which boat the Sabbath came to 
this country, and in which boat it will go out. The 
Sabbath came to this country in the Mayflower, and 
if it ever leaves, if the Sabbath ever leaves this 
country, it will go in the ark that floats above a del- 
uge of a destroyed nation. If you have ever been 
in Brussels or in Paris on the Sabbath day, it requires 
no great persuasion for me on my part to get you to 
pray morning, noon and night, that such a Sabbath 
may never come to this country. 

Then all these movements are a war upon our po- 
litical institutions. When the Sabbath goes down 
the Republic goes down. Dissoluteness is inconsist- 
ent with self-government. Sabbath-breaking is dis- 
soluteness. What is the matter with republicanism 
in Italy and in Spain ? No Sabbath. What is the 
matter with republicanism in France ? France got a 
republic, but one day the modern Napoleon rode 
through the Champs Elysees, and the republic went 
down under the clattering hoofs. France has a re- 
public again, but how often it quakes from end to 
end, and one of the Commune has only just to plas- 
ter an insurgent advertisement against a stone wall, 
and all France is aquake and in fear of revolution 
that is to come. France will never have any quiet, 



ABOLITION OF SUNDAY. 



371 



happy and permanent republic until she quits her 
roystering Sabbaths and recognizes God and sacred 
things. Abolish the Sabbath, and then you have the 
Commune in America. Abolish the Sabbath, and 
then you have revolution, and then you have the sun 
of prosperity going # down in darkness and in blood. 
May the Lord God of Lexington and Bunker Hill 
and Gettysburg avert the catastrophe ! O men and 
women who believe in Christian things, O men and 
women in favor of popular liberty, stand in solid 
phalanx in this Thermopylae of our national history, 
for as certain as I stand here and you sit there, the 
triumph or overthrow of republican institutions in 
this country will be decided in this Sabbatic contest. 

Rally your voices, your pens, your printing-presses 
and all your influence in the Lord's artillery corps in 
behalf of the Christian Sabbath. Decree before high 
heaven that the Sabbath which you received from 
your ancestors shall go down undamaged to your 
children. For those who die battling in this contest 
we will chisel the epitaph : '* These are they who 
came out of great tribulation, and had their robes 
washed and made white in the blood of the Lamb." 
But for that man who proves recreant to the cause 
of God and his country in a crisis like this, there 
shall be no honorable epitaph, and he shall not be 
worthy of any burial-place in all this land, but per- 
haps some steam tug at midnight may take him out 
and drop him in the sea where the lawless winds 
which observe no Sunday may gallop over the grave 
of him who in life and death proved himself a traitor 
to the cause of God and American institutions. Long 
live the Christian Sabbath ! Perish forever all at- 
tempt to overthrow it! 



CHAPTER XXXVIII. 



THE BLOOD. 

44 The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin." — 
i John i : 7. 

I know that circumstances sometimes aggravate 
one's transgressions. If a child unwittingly does 
wrong you easily forgive him ; but we have done 
wrong, and we knew we were doing wrong. Every 
time man sins conscience rings the funeral bell. We 
may pretend not to hear it, we may put our fingers 
in our ears and try to go away from that sound ; but 
having transgressed, although we may have our fin- 
gers in our ears, we will hear the word coming, 
" The wages of sin is death. The soul that sinneth, 
it shall die. The way of the transgressor is hard." 
When you and I do wrong, when we have said that 
which we ought not to have said, when we have done 
that which we ought not to have done, we knew it, 
we knew it. 

I can come to the man who declares he is the 
worst man on earth, and I can preach the Gospel 
with just as much confidence to him as to this man 
who has all his life preserved his integrity. Oh, the 
broadness of this Gospel that says, " Whosoever,- 
whosoever! " However far you have wandered away 
from God you can come back, though you have gone 
through all the sins of the decalogue. " Whosoever, 
whosoever will, let him come." 

372 



THE BLOOD. 



373 



" Oh," says some man, " all that is very true for 
immoral people, but I have been a moral man all my 
life, and I don't need the gracious pardon." Have 
your thoughts always been right? Would you like 
to have the thoughts of the last fifteen years written 
out and presented before the eye of the world ? No. 
And if you would not want the thoughts of the last 
fifteen years all written out before the eye of the 
world, certainly you could not stand the divine 
scrutiny. Now, there is my right hand, and there is 
my left hand. You see the one just as plainly as the 
other. Well now, the sin of the heart and the sin of 
the life are as plain before God, the one as the other, 
and a thought to Him is just as plain as an action. 
Ah ! you need the pardon of the Gospel. 

You say you have never committed this, and you 
have never committed that, and you would not have 
done as this man did, and you would not as this man 
have gone astray in this direction, and as that man in 
another direction. Why, my brother, whether you 
know it or not, you have gone astray in many direc- 
tions. You say you have never committed murder. 
How do you know ? Have you ever hated anybody? 
Yes. Then you are a murderer. The Bible says so. 
Christ says so. " He that hateth his brother is a 
murderer." Do you hate anybody now? Is there 
anybody in all the earth you hate now ? You are a 
murderer. " He that hateth his brother is a mur- 
derer." So, my brother, you are not as pure as you 
thought you were, you are not as good as you 
thought you were, if you say you have no sin to be 
forgiven. 

You say you have never committed theft. I do 
not suppose you have ever wronged your fellow-man, 



374 



THE BLOOD. 



but have you taken an hour of a day from God and 
devoted it to wrong purposes? If you have, then 
you have been guilty of robbing God. It is a mean 
thing to steal from a man. It is a worse thing to steal 
from God. The Bible cries out, Will a man rob God? 
Yes ; we have all robbed Him. Now, let us come to 
confessional, and let us acknowledge that we need 
the mercy and the pardon of God. We all need it ; 
there is not an exception. "All have sinned and 
come short of the glory of God. There is none that 
doeth good, no, not one." 

Just let me blow the trumpet of resurrection, and 
let the sins of the best man in this house — all the sins 
of his past life — come up. Let the larger sin of the 
hundred be captain of the company, and let the 
greater sin of the thousand be colonel of the regi- 
ment, and let the mightiest sin of his life command 
the forces, vast as those of Xerxes, vaster, vaster. 
All the sins of that man's life coming down upon him. 
One man against a million transgressions, what 
chance has he ? Where in the round of God's 
mercy is there any help for us ? Rise, you seas, and 
whelm the host. Strike, you lightning, and consume 
the foe. The wave rolls back from the beach, and 
says, " No help in me." The lightning sheathes it- 
self in the black scabbard of the midnight cloud, and 
says, " No help in me." Yonder I see the rider on 
the white horse. Make way for the courier. He 
swings his sword. It is the captain of salvation come 
for our rescue. Fall back, my sins. Fall back, my 
sorrows. All the transgressions of my heart and life 
are utterly scattered, and I cry, " Victory through 
our Lord Jesus Christ ! " Oh, what a Christ he is. 

Do you wonder that men and women have died for 



THE BLOOD. 



375 



Him ? Do you wonder that Margaret, the Scotch 
girl, would not give up her Lord when fastened down 
to the beach of the sea, and the persecutors thought, 
as the waves rolled on, she would give up her Christ? 
But fastened down at the beach when the tide was 
out, she continued in prayer until the tide came up, 
came to the ankles, came to the girdle, came to the 
shoulder, came to the lip, and with her last utterance 
she said, " My Lord, my God ! He has been so good 
to me ; I cannot surrender Him now, though the 
waves may go over me — my Lord, my Christ, my 
pardon, my peace," and the waves rolled over her. 

Do you wonder that men and women and children 
have died for such a Lord as this? Oh, do you not 
want His consolation as well as pardon ? How many 
of you have had misfortunes and trials, and you want 
this Christ. Oh, when those into whose bosom we 
have breathed our sorrows are snatched away, Christ's 
heart still beats ; and when all other lights go out we 
see coming out from behind the cloud something that 
we cannot at first tell what it is, but it gets brighter 
and brighter, and we find it is the star, the star of 
hope, the star of consolation, the star of Jesus ! 

Oh, there are different kinds of hands. There is 
the hand of care that opens hard on you, and there is 
the hand of bereavement that snatched your loved 
ones away from you, and there is the hand of tempt- 
ation that strikes you back into darkness ; but there 
is a hand so different from all these, and it is so kind, 
and it is so gentle. It is the hand that wipeth away 
all tears from all eyes — it is the hand of Jesus; Do 
you not want Him? Would you not like to have 
that pardon to-day ? Would you not like to have His 
comfort ? 



376 



THE BLOOD. 



As at the sea beach we join hands and go down 
and bathe, and let the waters roll over us, and we 
feel great exhilaration, I wish we could by scores and 
hundreds and thousands to-day just join hands, and 
wade down in this great Atlantic of God's forgive- 
ness — not standing on the margin paddling the rip- 
ples with our feet, but wading clear down in the sea 
and letting the crimson billows roll over us. Oh, 
you must have this Christ ! If you reject Him, all 
those gaping wounds will plead against you, and they 
will haunt you through eternity with the thought of 
what you might have been. Oh, take your feet out of 
your Brother's blood ! Do not go down condemned 
for fratricide and regicide and deicide. Do not do 
it ! Better for thee that Calvary had never borne its 
burden, and better for thee that those loving lips had 
never uttered an invitation, if, rejecting all, you go 
down into desolation and darkness, your hands and 
feet bedabbled with the blood of the Son of God. O 
dying but immortal men, O judgment-bound hearers, 
repent, believe, and live ! How shall we escape if 
we neglect so great salvation ? . 

There will be a password at the gate of heaven ! 
I see a great multitude coming up, and they say, 
" Make way, open the gate, let us in, we were hon- 
ored on earth ; we had a great position in the world, 
and we want a great position in heaven." But the 
gate-keeper says, " I never knew you." Here come 
another throng. They say, " We did a great many 
magnanimous things, we endowed colleges, we estab- 
lished schools, and we were celebrated for our phil- 
anthropies. Open the gate now. Let us come in 
and get our reward." A voice from within says, " I 
never knew you." But here come up a great throng, 



THE BLOOD. 



377 



thousands and tens of thousands, and they knock at 
the gate. They say : " We were wanderers from 
God, and we deserved to die, but we heard the voice 
of Jesus." "Aye," says the gate-keeper, " that is the 
pass-word — Jesus, Jesus, Jesus ! Lift up your heads, 
ye everlasting gates, and let them come in." 



CHAPTER XXXIX. 



CAN THE UNPARDONABLE SIN BE COMMITTED IN 
OUR TIME? 

In my opinion, the sin against the Holy Ghost was 
ascribing the works of the Spirit to Satanic agency. 
Indeed, the Bible distinctly so declares. Here is a 
man who is restored to 1 sight after having been blind, 
and in Christ's time a man says to him, " That's the 
work of Beelzebub ; " or a man dead is brought to 
life by the Lord Jesus, and some one says, " That 
man was brought to life by Satanic power, and not 
by Divine power." As soon as a man thought that 
or said that, he dropped under the curse. 

I do not believe it is possible to commit that sin in 
our time. I think it only could be committed in 
apostolic times. The day of miracles has ceased, and 
Christ is not present in body, and I have the opinion 
that that sin cannot be committed in our own day. 
However, it is a very dangerous thing to say any- 
thing against the Holy Ghost, and the human race 
has been most mercifully kept from that. You have 
heard men swear by the name of Almighty God, and 
swear by the name of Jesus Christ, but you have 
never heard any one swear by the Holy Ghost ; so I 
can feel there is salvation for all. 

But there are persons who are afraid that they 
have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, and 
that they can never be pardoned. That very anxiety 

378 



THE UNPARDONABLE SIN. 379 

was produced by the Holy Ghost, and shows you 
are not forsaken. And this anxiety which you feel 
in regard to this subject, and this earnest question 
that you are asking, are proof positive that your soul 
is being moved by the Holy Ghost, and you are not 
becalmed forever. There is an opportunity of getting 
into the harbor. 

A man may commit an irrevocable sin. 

That is, he may do a wrong that can never be cor- 
rected, he may do something for which afterward he 
shall seek a place of repentance and not find it, 
though he seek it with tears. Esau had a birthright. 
It meant temporal and spiritual blessing. In a fit of 
hunger one day he traded it off for something to eat. 
As though you should take bonds and mortgages and 
government securities, and in some fit of recklessness 
or hunger you should go into a restaurant and put 
down these valuables and legally transfer them in 
order that you might get some style of food. Esau 
for a mess of pottage sold his birthright. He was 
very sorry about it afterward, but he could not get it 
back. He sought a place of repentance, and sought 
it carefully and with tears, but could not find it. 

Now, while I do not think it is possible for you to 
commit the unpardonable sin, it is possible for you 
and for me to make irrevocable mistakes, and in this 
class of irrevocable mistakes, in the first place, I put 
the follies of a misspent youth. 

At forty, or fifty, or sixty years of age we may 
wake up and say, " Oh, the neglects of my early 
studies when I was at school or college ; how I 
neglected geology, and mathematics, and chemistry ; 
I wish I had not neglected them ; how very helpful 
they would have been to me in the duties of life ; I 



38o 



THE UNPARDONABLE SIN. 



am sorry." Are you sorry ? You will never get 
back those advantages, it does not make any differ- 
ence how sorry you are. God will forgive you, but 
you will never forgive yourself. You may say, " Oh, 
if I had only disciplined my mind when I had the 
opportunity ! " I do not wonder at your regret. You 
can seek a place of repentance ; you will seek it in 
vain, you cannot find it. A man at fifty years of age 
says, " Oh, I wish I had not on me these habits of in- 
dolence! When will I ever get rid of them?" 
Never. Every stroke of work you do will be against 
the protest of your entire physical nature. You get 
that habit on you when you are twenty or twenty-five 
years of age, and you will never get over it. 

A man always — every man has an idea in his mind 
that somewhere ih the future there will be a time 
when he can correct his mistakes. If we only repent 
in time God will forgive us, and then it will be just 
as though we had never sinned. My subject runs in 
collision with that theory. There are those who go 
in the days of their youth and commit transgressions. 
They call it " sowing wild oats." 

They say, " Oh, we'll get over these things after a 
while, and then we'll devote ourselves to high and 
noble enterprises." " They that sow to the winds 
will reap the whirlwind." A man at forty or fifty 
years of age says, " Oh, if it wasn't for the sins of my 
youth, what a strong constitution I would have had r 
and how useful I might have been to the world and 
the church." You are sorry. Are you? Yes, but 
that does not bring back the energy that you lost. 

God forgives, but the laws of nature never forgive. 
Why do I say this? To give annoyance to those 
who have only baneful retrospection? No, for the 



THE UNPARDONABLE SIN. 



381 



benefit of these young people. I want them to 
understand that people never get over the sins of 
their youth, though God may forgive those sins. I 
want them to understand that eternity is wrapped up 
in this hour. I want them to understand that a 
minute is not made up of sixty seconds, but of ever- 
lasting ages. Oh, what a dignity this gives to the 
lives of these young people ! In the light of this sub- 
ject life is not something to be smirked about, not 
something to be danced at, but something to be 
weighed in everlasting balances, the balances of eter- 
nity. Young man, the sin you committed yesterday, 
the sin you commit to-day, the sin you shall commit 
to-morrow, will be an everlasting sin in some re- 
spects. God may forgive you, the laws of nature 
never will. The scars of that sin will be everlasting. 

We start our children. When they are ten years 
of age we wake up and try to correct this or that 
habit. It is too late, I believe that if parents do 
not make an impression upon a child for Christ and 
for heaven before ten years are past, they never will 
make any impression. Talk about people beginning 
life at twenty-one ; life is decided between ten and 
twenty in nine cases out of ten. The following fifty 
years is not of so much importance in the formation 
of character as the first twenty. A man wakes up 
at fifty years of age. He says, " I must become a 
Christian ; here and now I yield my heart to God." 
He goes home a Christian. He has spent all his life 
in worldliness and sin. He says, " Now let us call 
the family together, and have prayers." He opens 
his Bible. He says, " Call the family together." 
Where are the family ? One in New Orleans, one in 
Cincinnati, one in Boston, two in eternity. Ah, he 



382 



THE UNPARDONABLE SIN. 



cannot call his family together ! I say it for the 
benefit of young parents, parents of twenty-five, or 
thirty, or thirty-five, now is the time for family 
prayers, now is the time to call your family together. 

Oh, the time to train our children for God and for 
heaven is at the start ; it is at the start. When a 
man comes at fifty years of age and chooses God, I 
congratulate him, but oh, I think what a pity you 
did not come twenty-five years ago. 

A father was trying to illustrate to his son his evil 
habits, and every time the son committed a sin the 
father drove a nail into a post until there were many 
nails in the post. The young man, after a while, 
began to repent his sins, and give up his evil habits, 
and every time he repented, the father took a nail 
out of the post, until after a while the nails were all 
gone out of the post. "But," said the son, "Father, 
the scars are all there yet." God forgives, but the 
scars stay. Do not be under the infatuation, young 
men, that because God forgives you, and because so- 
ciety after a while may forgive you, the laws of 
nature are ever going to forgive you. The follies of 
youth are irrevocable mistakes. 

In Belgium, sixty years ago, some miners got into 
a quarrel, and one set of miners, in order to revenge 
another set of miners, set fire to the mine where they 
were working. That fire has burned on for half a 
century ; it is blazing to-day. They can not put it 
out. It never will be put out until it is wrapped in 
the greater conflagration of the last day. It is easy 
to start a fire that never will be quenched. Oh, 
young men, be not under the infatuation that the sins 
of your youth can ever be eradicated. God will for- 
give you, and you may enter heaven, but the scars 
will be there yet. 



THE UNPARDONABLE SIN. 



383 



In this list I also put all lost opportunities of get- 
ting good. I never come to a Saturday night but I 
can see that during the week there were opportu- 
nities where I might have bettered my spiritual condi- 
tion. I never come to a birthday but I think there 
were times during the past year that might have 
been made better, and I neglected the opportunity. 
How is it with you ? Have you lost any oppor- 
tunities ? 

If a farmer takes a certain number of bushels of 
wheat, and he throws this wheat on a certain number 
of acres of ground properly prepared, he expects a 
proportionate number of sheaves. Have the sheaves 
of your moral and spiritual harvest corresponded 
with the truth and the advantages planted ? I cannot 
tell you, my brother, my sister. You know. You 
know. What does that mean ? Why, it means, if we 
are going to get any good out of this Sabbath we are 
going to get it before the hand of the clock turns 
around to twelve to-night. It means that opportu- 
nities gone are gone forever. It means that while at 
our feasts the chalice may be passed to me and I may 
decline it, yet that very chalice may come back to me 
after a while ; in this matter of the Gospel feast a 
chalice comes and I reject it — it never comes back — 
never. That one opportunity gone forever. 

In this class I put all lost opportunities of use- 
fulness. 

There is a chance of benefiting that man once — 
never again. You have a business partner who is a 
proud, arrogant man. If ordinarily you should say 
to him, " Attend to the things of the soul, become a 
Christian," he would say to you, " Mind your own 
business, and I'll mind mine." But there has been an 



384 



THE UNPARDONABLE SIN. 



affliction in his household, and his heart is tender. 
He is looking for sympathy and solace. Now is your 
time, oh, man ! Speak, or forever hold your peace. 
You are in a religious meeting. A great impression 
is being produced. Something says to you, " Now is 
the time for you to speak a word for God." Your 
cheek flushes ; you half arise from your seat ; you 
sink back, cowering before men whose breath is in 
their nostrils. Your neglect will tell on eternal ages. 

A lost opportunity of getting good, or of doing 
good, never comes back. You may fish for it ; it will 
never take the hook. You may dig for it; it will 
never be found. 



CHAPTER XL. 



INTOLERANCE. 

" Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth ; and he 
said Sibboleth ; for he could not frame to pronounce it right. 
Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan." — 
Judges 12: 6. 

Do you notice the difference of pronunciation be- 
tween shibboleth and sibboleth ? A very small and 
unimportant difference, you say. And yet, that dif- 
ference was the difference between life and death for 
a great many people. The Lord's people, Gilead 
and Ephraim, got into a great fight, and Ephraim 
was worsted, and on the retreat came to the fords of 
the river Jordan to cross. Order was given that all 
Ephraimites coming there be slain. But how could 
it be found out who were Ephraimites? They were 
detected by their pronunciation. Shibboleth was a 
word that stood for river. The Ephraimites had a 
brogue of their own, and when they tried to say 
shibboleth always left out the sound of the " h." 
When it was asked that they say shibboleth they 
said sibboleth, and were slain. " Then said they 
unto him, say now shibboleth ; and he said sibboleth, 
for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then 
they took him and slew him at the passages of 
Jordan." A very small difference, you say, between 
Gilead and Ephraim, and yet how much intolerance 
about that small difference ! The Lord's tribes in our 

385 *s ' 



3 86 



INTOLERANCE. 



time — by which I mean the different denominations 
of Christians — sometimes magnify a very small dif- 
ference, and the only difference between scores of 
denominations to-day is the difference between shib- 
boleth and sibboleth. The church of God is divided 
into a great number of denominations. Time would 
fail me to tell of the Calvinists, and the Arminians, 
and the Sabbatarians, and the Baxterians, and the 
Dunkers, and the Shakers, and the Quakers, and the 
Methodists, and the Baptists, and the Episcopalians, 
.and the Lutherans, and the Congregationalists, and 
the Presbyterians, and the Spiritualists, and a score 
of other denominations of religionists, some of them 
founded by very good men, some of them founded 
by very egotistic men, some of them founded by 
very bad men. But as I demand for myself liberty 
of conscience, I must give that same liberty to every 
other man, remembering that he no more differs from 
me than I differ from him. I advocate the largest 
liberty in all religious belief and form of worship. 
In art, in politics, in morals, and in religion, let there 
be no gag law, no moving of the previous question, 
no persecution, no intolerance. 

You know that the air and the water keep pure by 
constant circulation, and I think there is a tendency 
in religious discussion to purification and moral 
health. Between the fourth and the sixteenth cen- 
turies the Church proposed to make people think 
aright by prohibiting discussion, and by strong cen- 
sorship of the press, and rack, and gibbet, aud hot 
lead down the. throat, tried to make people orthodox ; 
but it was discovered that you cannot change a man's 
belief by twisting off his head, or that you can make 
a man see things differently by putting an awl 



INTOLERANCE. 



387 



through his eyes. There is something in a man's 
conscience which will hurl off the mountain that you 
threw upon it, and, unsinged of the fire, out of the 
flame will make red wings on which the martyr will 
mount to glory. 

The truth will conquer just as certainly as that 
, God is stronger than the devil. Let Error run, if 
' you only let Truth run along with it. Urged on by 
skeptic's shout and transcendentalist's spur, let it run. 
God's angels of wrath are in hot pursuit, and quicker 
than eagle's beak clutches out a hawk's heart, God's . 
vengeance will tear it to pieces, 

Bigotry is often the child of ignorance. You sel- 
V^dom find a man with large intellect who is a bigot. 
It is the man who thinks he knows a great deal, but 
does not. That man is almost always a bigot. The 
whole tendency of education and civilization is to 
bring a man out of that kind of state of mind and 
heart. There was in the far East a great obelisk, 
and one side of the obelisk was white, another side 
of the obelisk was green, another side of the obelisk 
was blue, and travelers went and looked at that obe- 
lisk, but they did not walk around it. One man 
looked at one side, another at another side, and they 
came home each one looking at only one side ; and 
they happened to meet, the story says ; and they got 
into a rank quarrel about the color of that obelisk. 
One man said it was white, another man said it was 
green, another man said it was blue, and when they 
were in the very heat of the controversy a more intel- 
ligent traveler came, and said : " Gentlemen, I have 
seen that obelisk, and you are all right, and you are all 
wrong. Why didn't you walk all round the obelisk?" 
Look out for the man who sees only one side of a 



388 



INTOLERANCE. 



religious truth. Look out for the man who never 
walks around about these great theories of God and 
eternity and the dead. He will be a bigot inevitably 
— the man who only sees one side. There is no man 
more to be pitied than he who has in his head just 
one idea — no more, no less. More light, less sec- 
tarianism. There is nothing that will so soon kill 
bigotry as sunshine — God's sunshine. 

So I have set before you what I consider to be the 
causes of bigotry. I have set before you the origin 
of this great evil. What are some of the baleful 
effects ? First of all, it cripples investigation. You 
are wrong, and I am right, and that ends it. No taste 
for exploration, no spirit of investigation. From the 
glorious realm of God's truth, over which an arch- 
angel might fly from eternity to eternity and not 
reach the limit, the man shuts himself out and dies, a 
blind mole under a corn-shock. It stops all inves- 
tigation. 

While each denomination of Christians is to present 
all the truths of the Bible, it seems to me that God 
has given to each denomination an especial mission to 
give particular emphasis to some one doctrine ; and so 
the Calvinistic churches must present the sovereignty 
of God, and the Arminian churches must present 
man's free agency, and the Episcopal churches must 
present the importance of order and solemn cere- 
mony, and the Baptist churches must present the ne- 
cessity of ordinances, and the Congregational Church 
must present the responsibility of the individual mem- 
ber, and the Methodist Church must show what holy 
enthusiasm hearty congregational singing can ac- 
complish. While each denomination of Christians 
must set forth all the doctrines of the Bible, I feel 



INTOLERANCE. 



389 



it is especially incumbent upon each denomination to 
put particular emphasis on some one doctrine. 

Another great damage done by the sectarianism 
and bigotry of the church is that it disgusts people 
with the Christian religion. Now, my friends, the 
Church of God was never intended for a war bar- 
rack. People are afraid of a riot. You go down the 
street and you see an excitement, missiles flying 
through the air, and you hear the shocks of fire-arms. 
Do you, the peaceful and industrious citizen, go 
through that street? Oh, no! you will say, " I'll go 
around the block." Now, men come and look upon 
this narrow path to heaven, and sometimes see the 
ecclesiastical brickbats flying every whither, and they 
say, " Well, I guess I'lLtake the broad road ; if it is so 
rough, and there is so much sharp shooting on the 
narrow road, I guess I'll try the broad road." 

Francis I. so hated the Lutherans that he said if he 
thought there was one drop of Lutheran blood in his 
veins he would puncture them and let that drop out. 
Just as long as there is so much hostility between de- 
nomination and denomination, or between one pro- 
fessed Christian and another, or between one church 
and another; just so long men will be disgusted with 
the Christian religion, and say, " If that is religion, I 
want none of it." 

Bigotry and sectarianism do great damage in 
the fact that they hinder the triumph of the Gos- 
pel. Oh, how much wasted ammunition, how many 
men of splendid intellect have given their whole 
life to controversial disputes, when, if they had 
given their life to something practical, they might 
have been vastly useful ! Suppose there were a 
common enemy coming up the bay through the 



390 



INTOLERANCE. 



Narrows, and all the forts around New York be- 
gan to fire into each other — you would cry out, 
" National suicide ! why don't those forts blaze away 
in one direction, and that against the common 
enemy? " And yet I sometimes see in the Church of 
the Lord Jesus Christ a strange thing going on ; 
Church against Church, minister against minister, 
denomination against denomination, firing away into 
their own fort, or the fort which ought to be on the 
same side, instead of concentrating their energy, and 
giving one mighty and everlasting volley against the 
navies of darkness, riding up through the bay ! 

I go out sometimes in the summer, and I find two 
beehives, and these two h'ives are in a quarrel. I 
come near enough, not to be stung, but I come just 
near enough to hear the controversy, and one bee- 
hive says, " That field of clover is the sweetest/' and 
another beehive says, " That field of clover is the 
sweetest." I come in between them, and I say, 
" Stop this quarrel ; if you like that field of clover 
best, go there ; if you like that field of clover best, 
go there ; but let me tell you that that hive which 
gets the most honey is the best hive.'' So I come 
out between the Churches of the Lord Jesus Christ. 
One denomination of Christians says, " That field of 
Christian doctrine is best," and another says, " This 
field of Christian doctrine is best." Well, I say, "Go 
where you get the most honey." That is the best 
church which gets the most honey of Christian 
grace for the heart, and the most honey of Christian 
usefulness for the life. 

Beside that, if you want to build up any denomi- 
nation, you will never build it up by trying to pull 
some other down. Intolerance never put anything 



INTOLERANCE. 



391 



down. How much has Intolerance accomplished, 
for instance, against the Methodist Church ? For 
long years her ministry were forbidden the pulpits of 
Great Britain. Why was it that so many of them 
preached in the fields ? Simply because they could 
not get in the churches. And the name of the 
Church was given in derision and as a sarcasm. The 
critics of the Church said, " They have no order, 
they have no method in their worship ; " and the 
critics, therefore, in irony called them " Methodists." 

I am told that in Astor Library, New York, kept 
as curiosities, there are seven hundred and seven 
books and pamphlets against Methodism. Did Intol- 
erance stop that church ? No ; it is either first or 
second amid the denominations of Christendom, her 
missionary stations in all parts of the world, her men 
not only important in religious trusts, but important 
also in secular trusts. Church marching on, and the 
more intolerance against it, the faster it marched. 

What did Intolerance accomplish against the Bap- 
tist Church? If laughing scorn and tirade could 
have destroyed the church it would not have to-day 
a disciple left. 

The Baptists were hurled out of Boston in olden 
times. Those who sympathized with them were con- 
fined, and when a petition was offered asking leniency 
in their behalf, all the men who signed it were in- 
dicted. Has Intolerance stopped the Baptist Church ? 
The last statistics in regard to it showed twenty thou- 
sand churches and two million communicants. Intol- 
erance never put down anything. 

In England a law was made against the Jew. Eng- 
land thrust back the Jew and thrust down the Jew, 
and declared that no Jew should hold official posi- 



392 



INTOLERANCE. 



tion. What came of it? Were the Jews destroyed? 
Was their religion overthrown ? No. Who became 
Prime Minister of England only a little while ago? 
Who was next to the throne ? who was higher than 
the throne because he was counsellor and adviser? 
Disraeli, a Jew. What were we celebrating in all 
our churches as well as synagogues only a few weeks 
ago? The one hundredth birthday anniversary of 
Montefiore, the great Jewish philanthropist. Intoler- 
ance never yet put down anything. 

Having shown you the origin of bigotry or sec- 
tarianism, and having shown you the damage it does, 
I want briefly to show you how we are to war 
against this terrible evil, and I think we ought to 
begin our war by realizing our own weakness and 
our imperfections. If we make so many mistakes in 
the common affairs of life, is it not possible that we 
may make mistakes in regard to our religious affairs ? 
Shall we take a man by the throat, or by the collar, 
because he can not see religious truths just as we do? 
In the light of eternity it will be found out, I think, 
there was something wrong in all our creeds, and 
something right in all our creeds. But since we 
may make mistakes in regard to things of the world, 
do not let us be so egotistic and so puffed up as to 
have an idea that we can not make any mistakes in 
regard to religious theories. And then I think we 
will do a great deal to overthrow the sectarianism 
from our heart, and the sectarianism from the world, 
by chiefly enlarging in those things in which we 
agree, rather than those on which we differ. 

Now, here is a great Gospel platform. A man 
comes up on this side the platform, and says : "I 
don't believe in baby sprinkling." Shall I shove him 



INTOLERANCE. 



393 



off? Here is a man coming up on this side the plat- 
form, and he says: "I don't believe in the persever- 
ance of the saints." Shall I shove him off? No. I 
will say : "Do you believe in the Lord Jesus as your 
Saviour? do you trust Him for time and eternity?" 
He says, "Yes." "Do you take Christ for time and 
for eternity?" "Yes." I say: "Come on, brother; 
one in time and one in eternity ; brother now, brother 
forever." Blessed be God for a Gospel platform so 
large that all who receive Christ may stand on it ! 

I think we may overthrow the severe sectarianism 
and bigotry in our hearts, and in the church also, by 
realizing that all the denominations of Christians 
have yielded noble institutions and noble men. 
There is nothing that so stirs my soul as this thought. 
One denomination yielded a Robert Hall and an 
Adoniram Judson ; another yielded a Latimer and a 
Melville ; another yielded John Wesley and the 
blessed Summerfield, while our own denomination 
yielded John Knox and the Alexanders — men of 
whom the world was not worthy. Now, I say, if we 
are honest and fair-minded men, when we come up in 
the presence of such churches and such denomi- 
nations, although they may be different from our 
own, we ought to admire them, and we ought to love 
and honor them. Churches which can produce such 
men, and such large-hearted charity, and such mag- 
nificent martyrdom, ought to win our affection — at 
any rate, our respect. So, come on, ye ninety-five 
thousand Episcopalians in this country, and ye four 
hundred thousand Presbyterians, and ye nine hun- 
dred thousand Baptists, and ye two million Metho- 
dists — come on ; shoulder to shoulder we will march 
for the world's conquest; for all nations are to be 



394 



INTOLERANCE. 



saved, and God demands that you and I help do it. 
Forward, the whole line ! 

Moreover, we may also overthrow the feeling of 
severe sectarianism by joining other denominations 
in Christian work. I like when the springtime 
comes and the anniversary occasions begin, and all 
denominations come upon the same platform. That 
overthrows sectarianism in the Young Men's Chris- 
tian Association, in the Bible Society, in the Tract 
Society, in the Foreign Missionary Society shoulder 
to shoulder, all denominations. 

Perhaps I might more forcibly illustrate this truth 
by calling your attention to an incident which took 
place four or five or six years ago. One Monday 
morning at about two o'clock, while her nine hun- 
dred passengers were sound asleep in her berths 
dreaming of home, the steamer Atlantic crashed into 
Mars Head. Five hundred souls in ten minutes 
landed in eternity ! Oh, what a scene ! Agonized men 
and women running up and down the gangways, and 
clutching for the rigging, and the plunge of the help- 
less steamer, and the clapping of the hands of the 
merciless sea over the drowning and the dead, threw 
two continents into terror. But see this brave quar- 
termaster pushing out with the life-line until he gets 
to the rock ; and see these fishermen gathering up 
the shipwrecked, and taking them into the cabins, 
and wrapping them in the flannels snug and warm ; 
and see that minister of the Gospel, with three other 
men, getting into a life-boat and pushing out for the 
wreck, pulling away across the surf, and pulling 
away until they saved one more man, and then 
getting back with him to the shore. Can those 
men ever forget that night ? And can they ever for- 



INTOLERANCE. 



395 



get their companionship in peril, companionship in 
struggle, companionship in awful catastrophe and 
rescue? Never! Never! In whatever part of the 
earth they meet, they will be friends when they men- 
tion the story of that awful night when the Atlantic 
struck Mars Head. 

Well, my friends, our world has gone into a worse 
shipwreck. Sin drove it on the rocks. The old ship 
has lurched and tossed in the tempests of six thou- 
sand years. Out with the life-line ! I do not care 
what denomination carries it. Out with the life- 
boat! I do not care what denomination rows it. 
Side by side, in the memory of common hardships, 
and common trials, and common prayers, and com- 
mon tears, let us be brothers forever. We must be. 
We must be. 

" Our army of the living God, 
To whose command we bow ; 
Part of the host have crossed the flood, 
And part are crossing now." 

And I expect to see the day when all denomina- 
tions of Christians shall join hands around the cross 
of Christ and recite the creed : " I believe in God the 
Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and in 
Jesus Christ, and in the communion of Saints, and in 
the life everlasting." May God inspire us all with 
the largest-hearted Christian charity. 



CHAPTER XLI. 



THE WITNESS-STAND. 

In the days of George Stephenson, the perfecter 
of the locomotive engine, the scientists proved con- 
clusively that a railway train could never be driven 
by steam-power successfully, and without peril ; but 
the rushing express trains from Liverpool to Edin- 
burgh, and from Edinburgh to London, have made 
all the nations witnesses of the splendid achievements. 
Machinists and navigators proved conclusively that 
a steamer could never cross the Atlantic Ocean ; but 
no sooner had they successfully proved the impossi- 
bility of such an undertaking than the work was 
done, and the passengers on the Cunard, and the 
Inman, and the National, and the White Star lines 
are witnesses. There went up a guffaw of wise 
laughter at Professor Morse's proposition to make 
the lightning of heaven his errand-boy, and it was 
proved conclusively that the thing could never be 
done ; but now all the news of the wide world, by 
Associated Press put in your hands every morning 
and night, has made all nations witnesses. 

So in the time of Christ it was proved conclusively 
that it was impossible for Him to rise from the dead. 
It was shown logically that when a man was dead, 
he was dead, and the heart and the liver and the 
lungs having ceased to perform their offices, the 
limbs would be rigid beyond all power of friction or 

39 6 



THE WITNESS-STAND. 



397 



arousal. They showed it to be an absolute absurdity 
that the dead Christ should ever get up alive ; but 
no sooner had they proved this than the dead Christ 
arose, and the disciples beheld Him, heard His voice, 
and talked with Him, and they took the witness-stand 
to prove that to be true which the wiseacres of the 
day had proved to be impossible ; the record of the 
experiment and of the testimony is : " Him hath 
God raised from the dead, whereof we are witnesses." 

Now, let me play the skeptic for a moment. 

" There is no God," says the skeptic, " for I have 
never seen Him with my physical eyesight. Your 
Bible is a pack of contradictions. There never was 
a miracle. Lazarus was not raised from the dead, 
and the water was never turned into wine. Your 
religion is an imposition on the credulity of the 
ages." 

The fact is, that if this world is ever brought to 
God, it will not be through argument, but through 
testimony. You might cover the whole earth with 
apologies for Christianity and learned treatises in 
defense of religion — you would not convert a soul. 
Lectures on the harmony between science and reli- 
gion are beautiful mental discipline, but have never 
saved a soul, and never will save a soul. Put a man 
of the world and a man of the Church against each 
other, and the man of the world will in all probability 
get the triumph. There are a thousand things in 
our religion that seem illogical to the world, and 
always will seem illogical 

Our weapon in this conflict is faith, not logic ; faith, 
not metaphysics ; faith, not profundity ; faith, not 
scholastic exploration. But then, in order to have 
faith, we must have testimony, and if five hundred 



398 



THE WITNESS-STAND. 



men, or one thousand men, or five hundred thousand 
men, or five million men get up and tell me that they 
have felt the religion of Jesus Christ a joy, a com- 
fort, a help, an aspiration, I am bound as a fair- 
minded man to accept their testimony. 

We are witnesses that the religion of Christ is able 
to convert a soul. 

The Gospel may have had a hard time to conquer 
us, we may have fought it back, but we were van- 
quished. You say conversion is only an imaginary 
tiling. We know better. " We are witnesses." 
There never was so great a change in our heart and 
life on any other subject as on this. People laughed 
at the missionaries in Madagascar because they 
preached ten years without one convert ; but there 
are 33,000 converts in Madagascar to-day. People 
laughed at Doctor Judson, the Baptist missionary, 
because he kept on preaching in Burmah five years 
without a single convert ; but there are 20,000 Bap- 
tists in Burmah to-day. People laughed at Doctor 
Morrison, in China, for preaching there seven years 
without a single conversion; bnt there are 15,000 
Christians in China to-day. People laughed at the 
missionaries for preaching at Tahiti fifteen years 
without a single conversion, and at the missionaries 
for preaching in Bengal seventeen years without a 
single conversion ; yet in all those lands there are 
multitudes of Christians to-day. 

But why go so far to find evidence of the Gospel's 
power to save a soul? "We are witnesses." We 
were so proud that no man could have humbled us; 
we were so hard that no earthly power could have 
melted us ; angels of God were all around about us, 
they could not overcome us ; but one day, perhaps at 



THE WITNESS-STAND. 



399 



a Methodist anxious seat, or at a Presbyterian cate- 
chetical lecture, or at a burial, or on horseback, a 
power seized us, and made us get down, and made us 
tremble, and made us kneel, and made us cry for 
mercy, and we tried to wrench ourselves away from 
the grasp, but we could not. It flung us flat, and 
when we arose we were as much changed as 
Gourgis, the heathen, who went into a prayer- 
meeting with a dagger and a gun, to disturb the 
meeting and destroy it, but the next day was found 
crying, " Oh ! my great sins ! Oh ! my great Sav- 
iour ! " and for eleven years preached the Gospel of 
Christ to his fellow-mountaineers, the last words an 
his dying lips being, " Free grace ! " Oh, it was free 
grace ! 

There is a man who was for ten years a hard 
drinker. The dreadful appetite had sent down its 
roots around the palate and the tongue, and on down 
until they were interlinked with the vitals of body, 
mind, and soul ; but he has not taken any stimulants 
for two years. What did that? Not temperance 
societies. Not prohibition laws. Not moral suasion. 
Conversion did it. " Why," said one upon whom the 
great change had come, " sir, I feel just as though I 
were somebody else." 

There is a sea-captain who swore all the way from 
New York to Havana, and from Havana to San 
Francisco, and when he was in port he was worse 
than when he was on the sea. What power was it 
that washed his tongue clean of profanities, and made 
him a psalm-singer ? Conversion by the Holy Spirit. 

We are witnesses of the Gospel's power to com- 
fort. 

When a man has trouble, the world comes in and 



400 



THE WITNESS-STAND. 



says : " Now get your mind off this ; go out and 
breathe the fresh air ; plunge deeper into business." 
What poor advice. Get your mind off of it! When 
everything is upturned with the bereavement, and 
everything reminds you of what you have lost. Get 
your mind off of it ! They might as well advise you 
to stop thinking. You can not stop thinking, and 
you can not stop thinking in that direction. Take a 
walk in the fresh air ! Why, along that very street, 
or that very road, she once accompanied you. Out 
of that grass-plat she plucked flowers, or into that 
show-window she looked, fascinated, saying, "Come 
see the pictures." Go deeper into business ! Why, 
she was associated with all your business ambition, 
and since she has gone you have no ambition left. 

Oh, this is a clumsy world when it tries to comfort 
a broken heart. I can build a Corliss engine, I can 
paint a Raphael's " Madonna," I can play a Beetho- 
ven's " Eroica Symphony," as easily as this world 
can comfort a broken heart. And yet you have been 
comforted. How was it done ? Did Christ come to 
you and say : " Get your mind off this ; go out and 
breathe the fresh air; plunge deeper into business?" 
No. There was a minute when He came to you — 
perhaps in the watches of the night, perhaps in your 
place of business, perhaps along the street — and He 
breathed something into your soul that gave peace, 
rest, infinite quiet, so that you could take out the 
photograph of the departed one and look into the 
eyes and the face of the dear one, and say : "It is all 
right ; she is better off ; I would not call her back. 
Lord, I thank Thee that Thou hast comforted my 
poor heart." 

There are Christian parents who are willing to 



THE WITNESS-STAND. 



401 



testify to the power of this Gospel to comfort. Your 
son had just graduated from school or college and 
was going into business, and the Lord took him. Or 
your daughter had just graduated from the young 
ladies' seminary, and you thought she was going to 
be a useful woman, and of long life ; but the Lord 
took her, and you were tempted to say, " All this cul- 
ture of twenty years for nothing ! " Or the little 
child came home from school with the hot fever that 
stopped not for the agonized prayer or for the skilful 
physician, and the little child was taken. Or the 
babe was lifted out of your arms by some quick 
epidemic, and you stood wondering why God ever 
gave you that child at all, if so soon He was to take 
it away. And yet you are not repining, you are not 
fretful, you are not fighting against God. 

What has enabled you to stand all the trial? "Oh," 
you say, " I took the medicine that God gave my sick 
soul. In my distress I threw myself at the feet of a 
sympathizing God ; and when I was too weak to pray 
or to look up, He breathed into me a peace that I 
think must be the foretaste of that heaven where 
there is neither a tear, nor a farewell, nor a grave." 
Come, all ye who have been out to the grave to weep 
there — come, all ye comforted souls, get up off your 
knees. Is there no power in this Gospel to soothe 
the heart ? Is there no power in this religion to quiet 
the worst paroxysm of grief ? There comes up an 
answer from comforted widowhood, and orphanage, 
and childlessness, saying, " Aye, aye, we are wit- 
nesses." 

We are witnesses of the fact that religion has 
power to give composure in the last moment. I never 
shall forget the first time I confronted death. We 

26 



402 



THE WITNESS-STAND. 



went across the cornfields in the country. I was led 
by my father's hand, and we came to the farmhouse 
where the bereavement had come, and we saw the 
crowd of wagons and carriages ; but there was one 
carriage that especially attracted my boyish attention, 
and it had black plumes. I said, "What's that? what's 
that? Why those black tassels at the top?" and after 
it was explained to me, I was lifted up to look upon 
the bright face of an aged Christian woman who three 
days before had departed in triumph ; the whole 
scene made an impression I never forgot. 

I want to know if you have ever seen anything to 
make you believe that the religion of Christ can give 
composure in the final hour. Now, in the courts, at- 
torney, jury and judge will never admit mere hear- 
say. They demand that the witness must have seen 
with his own eyes, or heard with his own ears, and 
so I am critical in my examination of you now ; and 
I want to know whether you have seen or heard any- 
thing that makes you believe that the religion of 
Christ gives composure in the final hour. 

" Oh, yes," you say, " I saw my father and mother 
depart. There was a great difference in their death- 
beds. Standing by the one we felt more veneration. 
By the other there was more tenderness." Before 
the one you bowed perhaps, in awe. In the other 
case you felt as if you would like to go along with 
her. 

How did they feel in that last hour? How did 
they seem to act ? Were they very much frightened ? 
Did they take hold of this world with both hands, as 
though they did not want to give it up ? " Oh, no," 
you say, " no, I remember, as though it were yester- 
day ; she had a kind word for us all, and there were a 



THE WITNESS-STAND. 



403 



few mementoes distributed among- the children, and 
then she told us how kind we must be to our father 
in his loneliness, and then she kissed us good-bye and 
went asleep as calmly as a child in a cradle." 

What made her so composed ? Natural courage ? 
"No," you say, "mother was very nervous; when 
the carriage inclined to the side of the road, she 
would cry out ; she was always rather weakly." 
What, then, gave her composure ? Was it because 
she did not care much for you, and the pang of part, 
ing was not great ? " Oh," you say, " she showered 
upon us a wealth of affection ; no mother ever loved 
her children more than mother loved us ; she showed 
it by the way she nursed us when we were sick, and 
she toiled for us until her strength gave out." What 
then, was it that gave her composure in the last 
hour? Do not hide it. Be frank, and let me know. 
" Oh," you say, " it was because she was so good ; 
she made the Lord her portion, and she had faith 
that she would go straight to glory, and that we 
should all meet her at last at the foot of the throne." 

Here are people who say, " I saw a Christian 
brother die, and he triumphed." And some one else, 
" I saw a Christian sister die, and she triumphed." 
Some one else will say, " I saw a Christian daughter 
die, and she triumphed." Come, all ye who have 
seen the last moments of a Christian, and give testi- 
mony in this cause on trial. Uncover your heads, 
put your hand on the old family Bible from which 
they used to read the promises, and promise in the 
presence of high heaven that you will tell the truth, 
the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. With 
what you have seen with your own eyes, and from 
what you have heard with your own ears, is there 



404 



THE WITNESS-STAND. 



power in this Gospel to give calmness and triumph 
in the last exigency ? The response comes from all 
sides, from young, and old, and middle-aged : " We 
are witnesses ! " 



CHAPTER XLII. 

GOSPEL LOOKING-GLASS. 

We often hear about the Gospel of John, and the 
Gospel of Matthew, and the Gospel of Luke. There 
is just as certainly a Gospel of Moses, a Gospel of 
David, a Gospel of Jeremiah. In other words, Christ 
is as certainly in the Old Testament as in the New. 
If, after one has departed, we want to get an idea of 
just how he looked, we gather up all the photographs 
— some taken from one side the face, others from the 
other side the face, some the full face, some the full- 
length portrait, and then from all these pictures we 
recall to our mind just how the departed one looked. 
And I want all the pictures of the evangelists and all 
the pictures of ,the prophets to bring before me the 
image of Jesus Christ. I want to know just how He 
looked, and the more pictures I have of Him the 
better I . shall understand. 

When the Israelites were on their march through 
the wilderness they carried their church with them. 
They had what they called a tabernacle, a pitched 
tent. It was very costly and very beautiful. The 
framework was made out of forty-eight boards of 
acacia wood, set in sockets of silver. The curtains 
of the building were of purple and s'carlet and blue 
and fine linen, and they were hung on artistic loops. 
The candlestick had a shaft and branches and bowls 
of gold, and there were lamps of gold, and tongs of 
gold, and snuffers of gold, and rings of gold. 

405 



406 



GOSPEL LOOKING-GLASS. 



Now, there is one thing in this ancient tabernacle 
that especially attracts my attention, and that is the 
laver. It was a great basin filled with water, and 
the water went down through spouts and passed 
away, and the priests came and washed their hands 
and their feet as this water came down through the 
spouts and passed away. The laver was made out 
of the looking-glasses of the women who had fre- 
quented the tabernacle, and who had made that 
contribution to the furniture. The looking-glasses 
were not made out of glass, but of brass of a superior 
quality, polished and burnished, until just as soon as 
a priest looked into the side of the laver he saw his 
every feature and any spot of defilement that may 
have been on his countenance ; so that this laver of 
looking-glasses had two purposes; the first, to show 
those who came up the defilement upon themselves, 
and secondly, to offer them a place where they could 
get rid of it. And as everything in the ancient 
tabernacle was typical of something in the Gospel of 
the Son of God, or, at any rate, suggestive of it, I 
take this laver of looking-glasses as all suggestive of 
this Gospel, which first shows me sin, and then gives 
me an opportunity of divine ablution. 

" Oh, happy day, happy day, 
When Jesus washed my sins away !" 

This is the only mirror, the burnished side of this 
laver is the only mirror — that shows you just as you 
are. Some mirrors flatter the features, and they 
make you look better than you are. Some mirrors 
distort the features, and they make you look worse 
than you are. This mirror — this mirror of God's 
Word —shows you just as you are. These priests 
would come in, and just as soon as they confronted 



GOSPEL LOOKING-GLASS. 



407 



the burnished, polished side of this looking-glass, 
this metal out of which the laver was made, he saw 
where there was any pollution upon his counte- 
nance, where there was any spot that needed to be 
cleaned off. 

Just as soon as we come in and look at this mirror 
of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, we see ourselves just 
as we are. "All have sinned and come short of the 
glory of God." That is one showing". "All we, like 
sheep, have gone astray." That is another showing. 
" From the crown of the head to the sole of the foot 
there is no health in us." That is another showing. 
Some people call these defects imperfections, or ec- 
centricities, or erratic behavior, or wild oats, or high 
living ; but this Book calls them filth, transgression, 
the abominable thing that God hates. Paul got one 
glance at that mirror — that polished mirror — and he 
cried out : "Oh, wretched man that I am, who shall 
deliver me?" David caught one glimpse of that 
mirror, and he cried out ; " Purge me with hyssop, 
and I shall be clean ! " Martin Luther got one 
glimpse of that mirror, and he cried out to Staupitz : 
"Oh, my sins, my sins, my sins ! " 

Mind you, I am not talking about bad habits. We 
do not need any Bible to persuade us that blasphemy 
is wrong, or impure life is wrong, or evil speaking is 
wrong. I am now talking of the heart, the evil 
heart, the fountain of bad thoughts, of bad words, of 
bad actions. Here is ingratitude, for instance. If 
you hand me a glass of water, I say, " Thank you." 
If I hand you a glass of water, you say, " Thank 
you." But here we have been taking ten thousand 
mercies from the hand of God — our hunger fed, our 
thirst slaked, and we have had shelter and home, and 



4o8 



GOSPEL LOOKING-GLASS. 



ten thousand blessings and advantages, and yet I do 
not state a thing that you will not believe when I 
say that there are people in this house this morning 
fifty years of age who have never got down once on 
their knees and thanked God for his goodness. And 
here is pride of heart. Oh, we all have felt it, the 
pride that will not submit to God. Pride wants its 
own way. I will not quarrel with theologians about 
terms. I do not care whether you call it total de- 
pravity, or whether you call it something else. This 
evil nature we got from our parents, and they got it 
from their parents, and it goes down from generation 
to generation — a nature obnoxious to God before 
conversion, and after conversion there is not one in 
any of us except that which the grace of God planted 
and fostered and keeps. 

It seems to me that the reason there are compar- 
atively so few conversions in our day, is to be found 
in the fact that the preaching of our day is so apt to 
persuade a man that he is almost right anyhow, he 
only needs a little fixing up, he only needs a few 
touches of divine grace, and then he will be all right ; 
only a little out of order ; only a little repair neces- 
sary to our nature, instead of the broad, deep talk, 
which Baxter, and Payson, and Wesley, and George 
Whitefield thundered in the ears of a race trembling 
on the verge of instant and eternal disaster. Ah ! my 
friends, if there is any truth plainly set forth in this 
Book, it is that we have thoroughly gone astray, and 
that we are not by nature almost right, but alto- 
gether wrong. " The heart is deceitful above all 
things, and desperately wicked." Some of us have 
been in Hampton Court, and we remember that 
room where all the four walls are covered with mir- 



GOSPEL LOOKING-GLASS. 



409 



rors, and it does not make any difference which way 
you look, you see yourself. And when a man once 
fully steps inside this precinct of the Gospel he sees 
himself on all sides, every feature of moral deformity, 
every spot of moral taint. The whole head is sick, 
and the whole heart is faint. I do not care what 
your ancestry was, your ancestry was no better than 
my ancestry. But all generations have felt this 
touch of sin. Have you not realized it ? I will tell 
you why. You have never looked into the looking- 
glass, you have never seen the mirror. 

" But," says some one, " what is the use of display- 
ing our defects to us if we cannot get rid of them ? " 
None. You say: "What is the use of showing me 
that I am a sinner, if I cannot be anything but a 
sinner?" No use. I cannot imagine anything 
meaner than for a physician to come into a sick room 
and tell the patient how bad he looks, and to dis- 
course upon his affliction, and enlarge upon the fact 
that his case is hopeless, and then go out with his 
hands behind his back and whistling. There never 
has been a case like that. No physician would be so 
hard-hearted as that. If you cannot cure a disease 
you certainly will not make the matter worse by dis- 
coursing upon it, and I am the last man to stand here 
and talk about the sin of my heart and the sin of 
your heart unless there is a cure for it. There is no 
use for the polished side of this laver, no use for the 
burnished looking-glass, if there is no place for me to 
wash and be clean. 

Now, you notice that this laver of looking-glasses 
spoken of in my text, was filled with fresh water 
every morning. The servants of the tabernacle took 
buckets, and they filled them with the water, and 



410 GOSPEL LOOKING-GLASS. 

t 

they brought this bright water and poured it into the 
laver ; and that is a type of this Gospel of Jesus 
Christ, which is a fresh Gospel — fresh every year, 
every day, every hour, every moment. It is not a 
stagnant pool of accumulated corruption ; it is living 
water breaking from the rock. Christians often 
make the mistake of being satisfied with old experi- 
ences. Why, my brother and sister, I do not care 
what your experiences were ten, fifteen years ago. 
Do not give us a stale Gospel. Give us a fresh Gos- 
pel. What are you now ? Suppose a war should 
come, and I could prove to the government that ten 
years ago I was loyal, would that be any excuse for 
my not taking the oath of allegiance? The govern- 
ment would not ask me what I was ten years ago, 
but, " What are you now ?" And I do not ask you 
whether you were loyal to Jesus Christ ten or five 
, years, or one year ago. Are you loyal now? Are 
you fighting under the standards of Emanuel? Are 
you a soldier of Jesus Christ now? 

The trouble is, that a great many are depending 
upon old insurances against the damage of sin, and 
old insurances against the damage of the great 
future — old insurances that have run out. Suppose 
that you allowed the fire insurance on your home to 
expire yesterday, and to-day your home should be 
consumed, would you have the impertinence to go 
to-morrow morning with the papers to the insurance 
company and demand the amount of the policy ? No. 
If you did they would say : " You have no business 
here, you have no right to ask that, you let the insur- 
ance expire on Saturday ; this is Monday." O fol- 
lower of the Lord Jesus, do not depend upon old in- 
surances, ten, or twenty, or forty years old, as I know 



GOSPEL LOOKING-GLASS. 41 1 

some of you are depending upon them ! You want 
the policy paid up by the blood and the tears of the 
Son of God. 

But I notice in regard to this laver looking-glass 
that the priests there washed their hands and their 
feet. The water came down through the spouts 
from the basin, and they carefully and completely 
washed their hands and their feet, typical of the fact 
that this Gospel is to reach to the very extremities 
of our moral nature. Here is a man who says : " I 
will fence off part of my heart, and it shall be a gar- 
den full of flowers and fruits of Christian character, 
and all the rest shall be the devil's commons." You 
can not do it. It is all garden or none. You tell me 
about a man, that he is a good Christian except in 
politics. I deny your statement. If his religion will 
not take him in purity through the autumnal election, 
that religion is worth nothing in May, June, or July. 
You say that a man is a very good man, he is a 
Christian, he is useful, but he over-reaches in a bar- 
gain. I deny your statement. If it is an all-per- 
vading religion, if it touches a man at all at one 
point of his nature, it will pervade his entire nature. 

It is quite easy to be a Christian, or seems to be, 
on Sabbath, surrounded by kindly influences ; but 
not so easy to be a Christian when by one twitch of 
the roll of goods you can cover a defect in the silk. 
It is quite an easy thing to be a Christian with a 
psalm-book in your hand and the Bible on your lap ; 
not so easy to be a Christian when telling a merchant 
you can get better goods at less price at another 
store until he lets you have the goods cheaper than 
he has any capacity to sell them ; he is going to hurt 
himself when he does sell, for there are more lies told 



412 



GOSPEL LOOKING-GLASS. 



before the counter than behind the counter, ten to 
one. Christ will have you all, or He will have none 
of you. This grace must reach to the very extrem- 
ities of our nature. 

Suppose you have rented or purchased a whole 
house, and the former owner comes to you with the 
keys. There are twelve rooms in the house and he 
gives you six of the keys. You say : " Where are 
the other keys?" " Oh," he says, " you can't have 
them! There is a room on the second floor you 
can't have, and there is a room on the third floor and 
a room on the fourth floor you can't have, and there 
is a dark place in the attic you can't have, but here 
are the keys for the others." You say : " I purchased 
the whole house, and I want all the keys, or I don't 
want any of them." Here is a man who comes to 
God, and he gives part of his nature, and says : " You 
may go to this and go to that, but there is something 
I can't give up, there is a room in my nature I can't 
surrender; and this I want to keep, and that I want 
to keep. You can have half the keys of my soul, but 
not all." Then Christ will not have any. He will 
take everything, from cellar to attic — all of the keys 
to all your affections, all your hopes, all your 
ambitions, all your heart, all your life, or He will not 
take one key. The grace of God must touch the 
extremities, the very extremities of our moral nature. 
The priests when they came to this laver of looking- 
glasses washed their hands and washed their feet. 

I notice in this laver of looking-glasses that the 
washing in it was not optional, it was imperative. 
Here the priests came into the tabernacle. Suppose 
now one of them should say : " I washed before I 
came from home ; there's no use of my washing in 



GOSPEL LOOKING-GLASS. 



413 



this laver." God says: " You wash in this laver or 
die." But suppose the priest had said : " Why, there 
are other lavers just as bright as that from which 
this water was taken, and I might wash there just as 
well; why wash in the water of this laver?" God 
says : " Wash here or die." Not optional — impera- 
tive. Typical of the Gospel which says : " You wash 
in this fountain open for sin and uncleanness, or 
perish." We have no choice. 

" But," says some one, " couldn't God have pro- 
vided Other ways of salvation ?" Fifty of them, per- 
haps. I do not think that God exhausted all His 
wisdom when he laid out this plan of salvation. Per- 
haps he might have provided fifty plans of salvation. 
He provided only one. You say : " Might not a 
whole line of ships sail from earth to heaven ?" Yes, 
but there is only one going. Are there any other 
trees as luxuriant as the tree of Calvary ? Yes, 
more, for that one had neither bud nor blossom, and 
it was stripped and barked, But the one path to 
heaven is under the bare arm of that stripped tree. 
Not optional, but imperative. 

O brother, sister, come up to the laver of the 
Gospel ! O afflicted soul, come and bathe off your 
wounds, and, sick one, come up and cool your hot 
temples. Pardon for all your sin. Comfort for all 
your troubles. The dark cloud that hung thunder- 
ing over Sinai floated above Calvary and burst into 
a shower of the Saviour's tears. If you have any 
trouble, come to God. He will make you His dar- 
lings. He will make you his favorites. We cannot 
in our households have favorites, but if you have a 
favorite, mother, I know which one it is ; it is the 
sick one, the crippled one, the one that coughs all 



414 



GOSPEL LOOKING-GLASS. 



night, the weary one, the wan one — that is your 
favorite. And God seems to have His favorites, and 
they are the weak and the worn and the sick and the 
weary. Just come up to Him to-day, and He will 
put His arms around you, and He will kiss your wan 
cheek, and He will say as He hushes you with the 
divine lullaby : " As one whom his mother com- 
forteth, so will I comfort you." 



CHAPTER XLIII. 



RELIGION IN DRESS. 

That we should all be clad is proved by the open- 
ing of the first wardrobe in Paradise, with its apparel 
of dark green. That we should all, as far as our 
means allows us, be beautifully and gracefully ap- 
pareled, is proved by the fact that God never made 
a wave but He gilded it, or a tree but He garlanded 
it with blossoms, or a sky but He studded it with 
stars, or allowed the smoke of a furnace to ascend 
but He columned and turreted and domed and 
scrolled it into outlines of indescribable gracefulness. 
When I see the apple-orchards of the spring and the 
• pageantry of 'the autumnal forests I come to the con- 
clusion that if Nature ever does join a church, while 
she may be a Quaker in the silence of her worship, 
she never will be a Quaker in the style of her dress. 

Why the notches on a fern-leaf, or the stamen on a 
water-lily ? Why, when the day departs, does it let 
the folding-doors of heaven sta}^ open so long, when 
it might go in so quickly ? One summer morning I 
saw an army of a million spears, each one adorned 
with a diamond of the first water — I mean the grass 
with the dew on it. I say these things as a back- 
ground, to show you that I have no prim, precise, 
prudish, or cast-iron theories on the subject of human 
apparel. But the goddess of fashion has set up her 
throne in this country, and at the sound of the tim- 

415 



416 RELIGION IN DRESS. 

brels we are all expected to fall down and worship. 
This goddess of fashion has become a rival of the 
Lord of heaven and earth ; and it is high time that 
we unlimbered our batteries against this idolatry. 

When I come to count the victims of fashion I 
find as many masculine as feminine. Men make 
an easy tirade against woman, as though she were 
the chief worshiper at this idolatrous shrine, and no 
doubt there are men in the more conspicuous part of 
the pew who have already cast glances to the more 
retired part of the pew, their look a prophecy of a gen- 
erous distribution to others of the more cogent parts 
of my discourse. My words shall be as appropriate 
for one end of the pew as for the other. Men are as 
much the idolators of fashion as women, but they 
throw themselves on a different part of the altar. 
With men the fashion goes to cigars, and club-rooms, 
and yachting parties, and wine suppers. In the 
United States the men chew up and smoke one hun- 
dred millions of dollars' worth of tobacco every year. 
That is their fashion. 

But men do not abstain from millinery and elabora- 
tion of skirt through any superiority of humility. It 
is only because such appendages would be a blockade 
to business. What would sashes and trails three and 
a half yards long do in a Wall street stock market? 
And yet men are the disciples of fashion just as much 
as women. Some of them wear boots so tight they 
can hardly walk in paths of righteousness. And 
there are men who buy expensive suits of clothes 
and never pay for them, and who go through the 
streets in great stripes of color like animated checker, 
boards, and suggest to one that, after all, Tweed in 
prison dress may have got out of the penitentiary. 



RELIGION IN DRESS. 



417 



Then there are multitudes of men who, not satisfied 
with the bodies the Lord gave them, are padded, so 
their shoulders shall be square, carrying around a 
small cotton plantation ! And I understand a great 
many of them now paint their eyebrows and their 
lips; and I have heard from good authority that 
there are multitudes of men in Brooklyn and New 
York — men — things have got to such an awful pass — 
multitudes of men wearing corsets ! 

I say these things, because I want to show you 
that I am impartial in this discussion, and that both 
sexes, in the language of the Surrogate's office, shall 
" share and share alike." I shall show you what are 
the destroying and deathful influences of inordinate 
fashion. 

The first baleful influence is in fraud, illimitable 
and ghastly. Do you know that Arnold of the Revo- 
lution proposed to sell his country in order to get 
money to supply his wife's wardrobe? I declare 
here before God that the effort to keep up expensive 
wardrobes in this country is sending many business 
men to temporal and eternal perdition. What was it 
that sent Gilman to the penitentiary, and Philadelphia 
Morton to the watering of stocks, and the life-insur. 
ance presidents to perjured statements about their 
assets, and has completely upset our American 
finances ? What was it that overthrew Belknap, the 
United States Secretary at Washington, the crash of 
whose fall shook the continent ? 

But why should I go to these infamous defaultings 
to show what men will do in order to keep up great 
home style and expensive wardrobe, when you and I* 
know scores of men who are put to their wit's end 
and are lashed from January to December in the 

27 



4 i8 



RELIGION IN DRESS. 



attempt to keep up great home style. Our Washing- 
ton politicians may theorize until the expiration of 
their terms of office as to the best way of improving 
our monetary condition in this country ; it will be of 
no use, and things will be no better, until we learn to 
put on our heads and backs and feet and hands no 
more than we can pay for ! 

There are clerks in stores and banks on limited 
salaries who, in the vain attempt to keep the ward- 
robe of their family as showy as other wardrobes, 
are dying of muffs, and diamonds, and camel's-hair 
shawls, and high hats, and they have nothing left 
except what they give to cigars and wine-suppers, 
and they die before their time, and they will expect 
us ministers to preach about them as though they 
were the victims of early piety, and after a high-toned 
funeral, with silver handles at the side of their coffin^ 
of extraordinary brightness, it will be found out that 
in the act of dying and going to Greenwood they 
swindled the 'undertaker out of his legitimate 
expenses. 

The country is dressed to death. You are not sur- 
prised to find that the putting up of one public build- 
ing in New York cost millions of dollars more than it 
ought to have cost when you find out that the man 
who gave out the contracts paid more than five thou- 
sand dollars for his daughter's wedding dress. The 
cashmeres of a thousand dollars each are not rare on 
Broadway. What are men to do in order to keep up 
such home wardrobes? Steal — that is the only re- 
spectable thing it seems to them they can do. 

During the last fifteen years there have been 
innumerable fine businesses shipwrecked on the 
wardrobe. 



RELIGION IN DRESS. 



419 



The temptation comes in this way : A man thinks 
more of his family than he does of all the world out- 
side, and if they spend the evening in describing to 
him the superior wardrobe of the family across the 
street, that they cannot bear the sight of, the man is 
thrown on his gallantry and his pride of family, and, 
without translating his feelings into plain language, 
he goes into extortion and issuing false stock, and 
skillful penmanship in writing somebody else's name 
at the foot of a promissory note ; and they all go 
down together — the husband to the prison, the wife 
to the sewing machine, the children to be taken care 
of by those who were called poor relations. Oh, for 
some new Shakespeare to arise and write the tragedy 
of clothes ! 

Act the first of the tragedy — A plain but beautiful 
home. Enter, the newly-married pair. Enter, sim- 
plicity of manner and behavior. Enter, as much hap- 
piness as is ever found in one home. 

Act the second — Discontent with the humdrum of 
life. Enter, envy. Enter, jealousy. Enter, desire 
of display. 

Act the third — Enlargement of expenses. Enter, 
all the queenly dressmakers. Enter, the French 
milliners. 

Act the fourth — The tip-top of society. Enter, 
princes and princesses of New York life. Enter, 
magnificent plate and equipage. Enter, everything 
splendid. 

Act the fifth and last — Winding up of the scene. 
Enter, the assignee. Enter, the sheriff. Enter, the 
creditors. Enter, humiliation. Enter, the wrath of 
God. Enter, the contempt of society. Enter, death. 
Now let the silk curtain drop on . the stage. . The 
farce is ended, and the lights are out. 



420 



RELIGION IN DRESS. 



Will you forgive me if I say in tersest shape 
possible, that some of the men in this country have 
to forge, and have to perjnre, and have to swindle, to 
pay for their wives' dresses ? I do not care whether 
you forgive me or not. 

Again, inordinate fashion is the foe of all alms- 
giving. 

Men and women put so much in personal display 
that they often have nothing for God and the cause 
of suffering humanity. A Christian man cracks his 
Palais Royal gloves clear across the back by holding 
on to the one cent too tight as he puts it into the 
poor-box. A Christian woman, at the story of the 
Hottentots, crying copious tears into a twenty-five 
dollar handkerchief, and then gives a two-cent piece 
to the collection, thrusting it down under the bills so 
that people will not know but it was a ten-dollar gold 
piece. One hundred dollars for incense to fashion. 
Two cents for God. 

God gives us ninety cents out of every dollar. 
The other ten cents, by command of His Bible, be- 
long to Him. Is not God liberal according to this 
tithing system laid down in the Old Testament — is 
not God liberal in giving us ninety cents out of a 
dollar, when He takes but ten ? We do not like that. 
We want to have ninety-nine cents for ourselves and 
one for God. Now, I would a great deal rather steal 
ten cents from .you than God. I think one reason 
why a great many people do not get along in worldly 
accumulation faster, is because they do not observe 
this divine rule. God rises up and says : " Well, if 
that man is not satisfied with ninety cents of a dollar, 
then I will take the whole dollar, and I will give it to 
the man or woman who is honest with me." 



RELIGION IN DRESS. 



421 



The greatest obstacle to charity in the Christian 
Church to-day is the fact that men expend so much 
money on their stomachs, and women expend so 
much money on their backs they have got nothing 
left for the cause of God and the world's betterment. 
Inordinate fashion causes distraction in worship. 

You know very well there are a good many people 
who come to church just as they go to the races, to 
see who will come out ahead. What a flutter it 
makes in church when some woman with extra- 
ordinary display of fashion comes in ! " What a love 
of a bonnet ! " says some one. " What a perfect 
fright! "say five hundred. For the most merciless 
critics in the world are fashion critics. Men and 
women with souls to be saved passing the hour in 
wondering where that man got his flamboyant cravat 
or what store that woman patronizes. In many of 
our churches the preliminary exercises are taken up 
with the discussion of wardrobes. It is pitiable. Is 
it not wonderful that the Lord does not strike the 
meeting-house with lightning? 

What distraction of public worship ! Dying men 
and women, whose bodies are soon to be turned into 
dust, yet before three worlds strutting like peacocks, 
the awful question of the soul's destiny submerged 
by the question of Creedmoor polonaise and navy 
blue velvet with long fan train skirt, long enough to 
drag up the church aisle, the husband's store, office, 
shop, factory, fortune, and the admiration of half the 
people in the building. Men and women come late 
to church to show their clothes. People sitting down 
in a pew, taking up a hymn book, all absorbed at the 
same time in personal array, to sing : 



422 



RELIGION IN DRESS. 



" Rise, my soul, and stretch thy wings, 
Thy better portion trace ; 
Rise from transitory things 

Toward heaven, thy native place !" 

I turn Episcopalian long enough to say, " Good 
Lord, deliver us !" 

Insatiate fashion also belittles the intellect. 

Our minds are enlarged, or they dwindle just in 
proportion to the importance of the subject on which 
we constantly dwell. Can you imagine anything 
more be-dwarfing to the human intellect than the 
study of fashion? I see men on the street, who, 
judging from their elaboration, I think, must have 
taken two hours to arrange their apparel. 

What will be left of a woman's intellect after giv- 
ing years and years to the discussion of such ques- 
tions as the comparison between knife-plaits and 
box-plaits, and borderings of gray fox fur or black 
marten, or the comparative excellence of circulars of 
repped Antwerp silk lined with blue fox fur, or 
with Hudson Bay sable? They all land in idiocy, 
the first stages or the last stages. I have seen men 
at the summer watering-places, through fashion the 
mere wreck of what they once were — sallow of cheek, 
meager of limb, gone in at the chest ; showing no 
animation save in rushing across a room to pick up a 
lady's fan ; simpering along the corridors the same 
compliments they simpered twenty years ago. The 
fools of fashion are myriad. Fashion not only de- 
stroys the body, but it makes idiotic the intellect. 

Yet, my friends, I have given you only the milder 
phase of this evil. It shuts a great multitude out of 
heaven. The first peal of thunder that shook Sinai 
declared : " Thou shalt have no other god before 
me," and you will have to choose between the god- 



RELIGION IN DRESS. 



423 



dess of fashion and the Christian God. There are a 
great many seats in heaven, and they are all easy 
seats, but not one seat for the devotee of fashion. 
You could not sail up the harbor of heaven with that 
rigging. You would be fired on as a blockade-run- 
ner. Heaven is for meek and quiet spirits. Heaven 
is for those who think more of their souls than they 
do of their bodies. Heaven is for those who have 
more joy in Christian charity than they have in fash- 
ionable attire. 



CHAPTER XLIV. 



THE COMING SERMON. 

We hear a great deal in these days about the com- 
ing man, and the coming woman, and the coming 
time. Some one ought to tell us of the coming ser- 
mon. It is a simple fact that everybody knows that 
the sermon of to-day does not reach the world. 

The sermon of to-day carries along with it the dead- 
wood of all ages. Hundreds of years ago it was de- 
cided what a sermon ought to be, and it is the attempt 
of many theological seminaries and doctors of divinity 
to hew the modern pulpit utterances into the same 
old-style proportions. Booksellers will tell you they 
dispose of a hundred histories, a hundred novels, a 
hundred poems to one book of sermons. 

What is the matter? Some say the age is the 
worst of all the ages. It is better. Some say religion 
is wearing out, when it is wearing in. Some say 
there are so many who despise the Christian religion. 
I answer, there never was an age when there were 
so many Christians, or so many friends of Christianity 
as this age has — our age — as to others a hundred to 
one. What is the matter, then ? It is simply be- 
cause our sermon of to-day is not suited to the age. 
It is the canal-boat in an age of locomotive and elec- 
tric telegraph. The sermon will have to be shaken 
out of the old grooves, or it will not be heard, and it 
will not be read. 

424 



THE COMING SERMON. 



Before the world is converted the sermon will have 
to be converted. You might as well go into the mod- 
ern Sedan or Gettysburg with bows and arrows in- 
stead of rifles, and bombshells, and parks of artillery, 
as to expect to conquer this world for God by the old 
styles of sermonology. Jonathan Edwards preached 
the sermons most adapted to the age in which he lived^ 
but if those sermons were preached now they would 
divide an audience into two classes: Those sound 
asleep and those wanting to go home. 

That coming sermon will be full of a living Christ 
in contradistinction to didactic technicalities. A ser- 
mon may be full of Christ though hardly mentioning 
His name, and a sermon may be empty of Christ 
while every sentence is repetitions of His titles. The 
world wants a living Christ, not a Christ standing at 
the head of a formal system of theology, but a Christ 
who means pardon and sympathy and condolence 
and brotherhood and life and heaven. A poor man's 
Christ. An overworked man's Christ. An invalid's 
Christ. A farmer's Christ. A merchant's Christ. 
An artisan's Christ. An every man's Christ. 

A symmetrical and fine-worded system of theology 
is well enough for theological classes, but it has no 
more business in a pulpit than have the technical 
phrases of an anatomist, or a physiologist, or physi- 
cian in the sick room of a patient. The world wants 
help, immediate and world-uplifting, and it will come 
through a sermon in which Christ shall walk right 
down into the immortal soul and take everlasting 
possession of it, filling it as full of light as is this 
noonday firmament. 

Oh, in that coming sermon of the Christian Church 
there will be living illustrations taken out from every- 



426 



THE COMING SERMON. 



day life of vicarious suffering — illustrations that will 
bring to mind the ghastlier sacrifice of Him who in 
the high places of the field, on the cross fought our 
battles and wept our griefs, and endured our struggle 
and died our death. 

A German sculptor made an image of Christ, and 
he asked his little child, two years old, who it was, 
and she said : " That must be some very great man." 
The sculptor was displeased with the criticism, so he 
got another block of marble and chiseled away on it 
two or three years, and then he brought in his little 
child, four or five years of age, and he said to her, 

Who do you think that is?" She said, " That must 
be the One who took little children in His arms and 
blessed them." Then the sculptor was satisfied. O 
my friends, what the world wants is not a cold Christ, 
not an intellectual Christ, not a severely magisterial 
Christ, but a loving Christ, spreading out His arms 
of sympathy to press the whole world to His loving 
heart. 

The coming sermon of the Christian Church will 
be a short sermon. 

Condensation is demanded by the age in which we 
live. No more need of long introductions and long 
applications and so many divisions to a discourse that 
it may be said to be hydra headed. In other days, 
men got all their information from the pulpit. There 
were few books and there were no newspapers, and 
there was little travel from place to place, and people 
would sit and listen two and a half hours ito a reli- 
.gious discourse, and "seventeenthly" would find them 
fresh and chipper. In those times there was enough 
room for a man to take an hour to warm himself up 
to the subject, and an hour to cool off. But what was 



THE COMING SERMON. 427 

a necessity then is a superfluity now. Congregations 
are full of knowledge from books, from newspapers, 
from rapid and continuous intercommunication, and 
long disquisitions of what they know already will not 
be abided. If a religious teacher cannot compress 
what he wishes to say to the people in the space of 
forty-five minutes, better adjourn it to some other day- 

The trouble is, we preach audiences into a Chris- 
tian frame and then we preach them out of it. We 
forget that every auditor has so much capacity of at- 
tention, and when that is exhausted he is restless. In 
all religious discourse we want locomotive power and 
propulsion ; we want at the same time stout brakes 
to let down at the right instant. It is a dismal thing 
after a hearer has comprehended the whole subject 
to hear a man say, " Now, to recapitulate," and " A 
few words by way of application," and "Once more," 
and " Finally," and " Now to conclude." 

Paul preached until midnight, and Eutychus got 
sound asleep and fell out of a window and broke his 
neck. Some would say, " Good for him." I would 
rather be sympathetic like Paul, and resuscitate him. 
The accident is often quoted now in religious circles 
as a warning against somnolence in church. It is just 
as much a warning to ministers against prolixity. 
Eutychus was wrong in his somnolence, but Paul 
made a mistake when he kept on till midnight. He 
ought to have stopped at eleven o'clock, and there 
would have been no accident. If Paul might have 
gone on to too great a length, let all those of us who 
are now preaching the Gospel remember that there 
is a limit to religious discourse, or ought to be, and 
that in our time we have no apostolic power of 
miracles. 



428 



THE COMING SERMON. 



Napoleon in an address of seven minutes thrilled 
his army and thrilled Europe. Christ's sermon on 
the mount, the model sermon, was less than eighteen 
minutes long at ordinary mode of delivery. It is not 
electricity scattered all over the sky that strikes, but 
electricity gathered into a thunderbolt and hurled ; 
and it is not' religious truth scattered over, spread 
out over a vast reach of time, but religious truth 
projected in compact form that flashes light upon the 
soul and rives its indifference. 

When the coming sermon arrives in this land and 
in the Christian Church, the sermon which is to 
arouse the world and startle the nations and usher in 
the kingdom, it will be a brief sermon. Hear it, all 
theological students, all ye just entering upon reli- 
gious work, all ye men and women who in Sabbath- 
schools and other departments are toiling for Christ 
and the salvation of immortals. Brevity ! Brevity! 

The coming sermon of which I speak will be a pop- 
ular sermon. There are those in these times who 
speak of a popular sermon as though there must be 
something wrong about it. As these critics are dull 
themselves the world gets the impression that a ser- 
mon is good in proportion as it is stupid. Christ was 
the most popular preacher the world ever saw, and 
considering the small number of the world's popula- 
tion, had the largest audiences ever gathered. He 
never preached anywhere without making a great 
sensation. People rushed out in the wilderness to 
hear Him, reckless of their physical necessities. So 
great was their anxiety to hear Christ, that taking no 
food with them, they would have fainted and starved 
had not Christ performed a miracle and fed them. 

Why did so many people take the truth at Christ's 



THE COMING SERMON. 429 

hands ? Because they all understood it. He illus- 
trated His subject by a hen and her chickens, by a 
bushel measure, by a handful of salt, by a bird's flight, 
and by a lily's aroma. All the people knew what He 
meant, and they flocked to Him. And when the com- 
ing sermon of the Christian Church appears it will 
not be Princetonian, nor Rochesterian, nor Ando- 
verian, nor Middletonian, but Olivetic — plain, practi- 
cal, unique, earnest, comprehensive of all the woes, 
wants, sins, sorrows and necessities of an auditory. 

But when that sermon does come, there will be a 
thousand gleaming scimeters to charge on it. There 
are in so many theological seminaries professors tell- 
ing young men how to preach, themselves not know- 
ing how, and I am told that if a young man in some 
of our theological seminaries says anything quaint, or 
thrilling, or unique, faculty and students fly at him, 
and set him right, and straighten him out, and smooth 
him down, and chop him off until he says everything 
just as everybody else says it. 

Oh, when the coming sermon of the Christian 
Church arrives, all the churches of Christ in our 
great cities will be thronged. The world wants spir- 
itual help. All who have buried their dead want 
comfort. All know themselves to be mortal and to 
be immortal, and they want to hear about the great 
future. I tell you, my friends, if the people of these 
great cities who have had trouble only thought they 
could get practical and sympathetic help in the 
Christian Church there would not be a street in New 
York, or Brooklyn, or Chicago, or Charleston, or 
Philadelphia, or Boston which would be passable on 
the Sabbath day, if there were a church on it, for all 
the people would press to that asylum of mercy, that 
great house of comfort and consolation. 



43° THE COMING SERMON. 

We hear a great deal of discussion now all over the 
land about why people do not go to church. Some 
say it is because Christianity is dying out, and be- 
cause people do not believe in the truth of God's 
Word, and all that. They are false reasons. The 
reason is because our sermons are not interesting and 
practical, and sympathetic and helpful. Some one 
might as well tell the whole truth on this subject, and 
so I will tell it. The sermon of the future, the Gos- 
pel sermon to come forth, and shake the nations, and 
lift people out of darkness, will be a popular sermon, 
just for the simple reason that it will meet the woes, 
and the wants, and the anxieties of the people. 

The sermon of the future will be an awakening ser- 
mon. From altar-rail to the front doorstep, under 
that sermon an audience will get up and start for 
heaven. There will be in it many a staccato passage. 
It will not be a lullaby ; it will be a battle charge. 
Men will drop their sins, for they will feel the hot 
breath of pursuing retribution on the back of their 
necks. It will be a sermon sympathetic with all the 
physical distresses as well as the spiritual distresses 
of the world. Christ not only preached, but He 
healed paralysis, and He healed epilepsy, and He 
healed the dumb, and the blind, and ten lepers. 

That sermon of the future will be an everyday 
sermon, going right down into every man's life, and 
it will teach him how to vote, how to bargain, how to 
plow, how to do any work he is called to, how to 
wield trowel, and pen, and pencil, and yardstick, and 
plane. And it will teach women how to preside over 
their households, and how to educate their children^ 
and how to imitate Miriam, and Esther, and Vashti 
and Eunice, the mother of Timothy ; and Mary, the 



THE COMING SERMON. 



431 



mother of Christ ; and those women who on North- 
ern and Southern battlefields were mistaken by the 
wounded for angels of mercy fresh from the throne 
of God. 



PART III 



Coal? to Ifje IJof&I ^alm, 



CHAPTER XLV. 



THE GATES OF HELL. 

You know about the gates of heaven. You have 
often heard them preached about. There are three 
to each point of the compass. On the north, three 
gates ; on the south, three gates ; on the east, three 
gates ; on the west, three gates ; and each gate is a 
solid pearl. Oh, gate of heaven, may we all get into 
it ! But who shall describe the gates of hell ? These 
gates are burnished until they sparkle and glisten in 
the gaslight. They are mighty, and set in sockets of 
deep and dreadful masonr}^. They are high, so that 
those who are in may not clamber over and get out. 
They are heavy, but they swing easily in to let those 
go in who are to be destroyed. 

I remember, when the Franco-German war was 
going on, that I stood one day in Paris looking at the 
gates of the Tuilleries, and I was so absorbed in the 
sculpturing at the top of the gates — the masonry 
and the bronze — that I forgot myself , and after awhile, 
looking down, I saw that there were officers of the 
law scrutinizing me, supposing, no doubt, I was 'a 
German, and looking at those gates for adverse pur- 
poses. But, my friends, we shall not stand looking 
at the outside of the gates of hell. I intend to tell 
you of both sides, and I shall tell you what those 
gates are made of. With the hammer of God's truth 
I shall pound on the brazen panels, and with the 

435 



43 6 THE GATES OF HELL. 

lantern of God's truth I shall flash a light upon the 
shining hinges. 

Gate the first: Impure literature. Anthony Corn- 
stock seized twenty tons of bad books, plates, and let- 
ter-press, and when Professor Cochran, of the Poly- 
technic Institute, poured the destructive acids on 
those plates, they smoked in the righteous annihila- 
tion. And yet a great deal of the bad literature of 
the day is not gripped of the law. It is strewn in 
your parlors ; it is in your libraries. Some of your 
children read it at night after they have retired, the 
gas-burner swung as near as possible to their pillow. 

Much of this literature goes under the title of 
scientific information. A book-agent with one of 
these infernal books, glossed over with scientific 
nomenclature, went into a hotel and sold in one day 
a hundred copies, and sold them all to women ! It is 
appalling that men and women who can get, through 
their family physician, all the useful information they 
may need, and without any contamination, should 
wade chin deep through such accursed literature, 
under the plea of getting useful knowledge, and that 
printing-presses, hoping to be called decent, lend 
themselves to this infamy. Fathers and mothers, be 
not deceived by the title, "medical works." Nine- 
tenths of those books come hot from the lost world, 
though they may have on them the names of the 
publishing houses of New York and Philadelphia. 

Then, there is all the novelette literature of the 
day flung over the land by the million. No one — 
mark this — no one systematically reads the average 
novelette of this day and keeps either integrity or 
virtue. The most of these novelettes are written by 
broken-down literary men for small compensation, on 



THE GATES OF HELL. 



437 



the principle that, having failed in literature elevated 
and pure, they hope to succeed in the tainted and 
the nasty. Oh, this is a wide gate of hell ! Every 
panel is made out of a bad book or newspaper. 
Every hinge is the interjoined type of a corrupt 
printing-press. Every bolt or lock of that gate is 
made out of the plate of an unclean pictorial. In 
other words, there are a million men and women in 
the United States to-day reading themselves into 
hell ! 

When in your own beautiful city, a prosperous 
family fell into ruins through the misdeeds of one of 
its members, the amazed mother said to the officer of 
the law : "Why, I never supposed there was any- 
thing wrong. I never thought there could be any- 
thing wrong." Then she sat weeping in silence for 
some time, and said : "Oh, I have got it now ! I 
know, I know! I found in her bureau, after she went 
away, a bad book. That's what slew her !" 

These leprous booksellers have gathered up the 
catalogues of all the male and female seminaries in 
the United States — catalogues containing the names 
and the residences of all the students, and circulars 
of death are sent to every one, without any exception. 
Can you imagine anything more dreadful? There is 
not a young person, male or female, or an old person, 
who has not had offered to him or her, a bad book or 
a bad picture. Scour your house to find out whether 
there are any of these adders coiled on your parlor 
center table, or coiled amid the toilet-set on the dress- 
ing-case. I adjure you before the sun goes down, to 
explore your family libraries with an inexorable 
scrutiny. Remember that one bad book or bad pic- 
ture may do the work for eternity. I want to arouse 



438 



THE GATES OF HELL. 



all your suspicions about novelettes. I want to put 
you on the watch against everything that may seem 
like surreptitious correspondence through the post- 
office. I want you to understand that impure litera- 
ture is one of the broadest, highest, mightiest gates 
of the lost. 

Gate the second : The dissolute dance. — You shall 
not divert me to the general subject of dancing. 
Whatever you may think about the parlor dance, or 
the methodic motion of the body to sounds of music 
in the family or the social circle, I am not now dis- 
cussing that question. I want you to unite with me 
this morning in recognizing the fact that there is a 
dissolute dance. You know of what I speak. It is 
seen not only in the low haunts of death, but in ele- 
gant mansions. It is the first step to eternal ruin for 
a great multitude of both sexes. 

You know, my friends, what postures and attitudes 
and figures are suggested of the devil. They who 
glide into the dissolute dance glide over an inclined 
plane, and the dance is swifter and swifter, wilder and 
wilder, until, with the speed of lightning, they whirl 
off the edges of a decent life into a fiery future. This 
gate of hell swings across the Axminster of many a 
fine parlor and across the ball-room of the summer 
watering-place. You have no right, my brother, my 
sister- — you have no right to take an attitude to the 
sound of music which would be unbecoming in the 
absence of music. 

Gate the third : Indiscreet apparel. — The attire of 
woman for the last four or five years has been beau- 
tiful and graceful beyond anything I have known ; 
but there are those that will always carry that which 
is right into the extraordinary and indiscreet. I 



THE GATES OF HELL. 



439 



charge Christian women neither by style of dress nor 
adjustment of apparel to become administrative of 
evil. Perhaps none else will dare to tell you, so I 
will tell you that there are multitudes of men who 
owe their eternal damnation to the boldness of wom- 
anly attire. 

Show me the fashion-plates of any age between this 
and the time of Louis the Sixteenth, of France, and 
Henry the Eighth, of England, and I will tell you the 
type of morals or immorals of that age or that year. 
No exception to it. Modest apparel indicates a 
righteous people. Immodest apparel always indi- 
cates a contaminated and depraved society. You 
wonder that the city of Tyre was destroyed with 
such a terrible destruction. Have you ever seen the 
fashion-plates of Tyre? 

I will show it to you : " Moreover, the Lord saith, 
because the daughters of Zion are haughty and walk 
with stretched-forth necks and wanton eyes, walking 
and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with 
their feet, in that day the Lord will take away the 
bravery of their tinkling ornaments about their feet, 
and their cauls, and their round tires like the moon, 
the rings and nose-jewels, the changeable suits of ap- 
parel, and the mantles, and the wimples, and the 
crisping-pins " (Isaiah 3 : 16-22). That is the fashion- 
plate of ancient Tyre. And do you wonder that God 
in His indignation blotted out the city ? 

Gate the fourth : Alcoholic beverage. — All the 
scenes of wickedness are under the enchantment of 
the wine-cup. That is what the waitresses carry on 
the platter. That is what glows on the table, That 
is what shines in illuminated gardens. That is what 
flushes the cheeks of the patrons who come in. .That 



THE GATES OF HELL. 



is what staggers the step of the patrons as they go 
out. Oh, the wine-cup is the pattern of impurity. 
The officers of the law tell us that nearly all the men 
who go into the shambles of death go in intoxicated, 
the mental and the spiritual abolished, that the brute 
may triumph. 

Tell me that a young man drinks, and I know the 
whole story. If he become a captive of the wine 
cup, he will become a captive of all other vices, only 
give him time. No one ever knows drunkenness 
alone. That is a carrion-crow that goes in a flock, 
and when you see that beak ahead, you may know 
the other beaks are coming. In other words, the 
wine-cup unbalances and dethrones one's better judg- 
ment, and leaves one the prey of all evil appetites 
that may choose to alight upon his soul. 

There is not a place of any kind of sin in the United 
States to-day that does not find its chief abettor in 
the chalice of inebriety. There is either a drinking- 
bar before, or one behind, or one above, or one under- 
neath. The officers of the law have said to me : 
" These people escape legal penalty because they are 
all licensed to sell liquor." Then I have said to my- 
self : " The courts that license the sale of strong 
drink, license gambling-houses, license libertinism, li- 
cense disease, license death, license all sufferings, all 
crimes, all despoliations, all disasters, all murders, all 
woe. It is the courts and the legislature that are 
swinging wide open this grinding, creaky, stupendous 
gate of the lost." 

But you say, "You have described these gates of 
hell, and shown us how they swing in to allow the en- 
trance of the doomed. Will you not, please, tell us 
how these gates may swing out to allow the escape of 
the penitent?" I reply, but very few escape. 



THE GATES OF HELL. 



441 



Of the thousand that go in, nine ^hundred and 
ninety-nine perish. Suppose one of these wanderers 
should knock at your door, would you admit her? 
Suppose you knew where she came from, would you 
ask her to sit down at your dining-table ? Would you 
ask her to become the governess of your children ? 
Would you introduce her among your own acquaint- 
ance ? Would you take the responsibility of pulling 
on the outside of the gate of hell while she pushed on 
the inside of that gate trying to get out? You would 
not — not one of a thousand of you that would dare to 
do it. You write beautiful poetry over her sorrows, 
and weep over her misfortunes, but give her practi- 
cal help you never will. There is not one person 
out of a thousand that will — there is not one out of 
five thousand that has come so near the heart of the 
Lord Jesus Christ as to dare to help one of these 
fallen souls. 

But you say, "Are there no ways of escape for the 
poor wanderers?" Oh, yes; three or four. The one 
way is the sewing-girl's garret, dingy, cold, hunger- 
blasted. But you say, " Is there no other way for her 
to escape?" Oh, yes. Another way is the street 
that leads to East River, at midnight, the end of the 
city dock, the moon shining down on the water mak- 
ing it look so smooth she wonders if it is deep enough. 
It is. No boatman near enough to hear the plunge. 
No watchman near enough to pick her out before she 
sinks the third time. No other way ? Yes. By the 
curve of the Hudson River Railroad, at the point 
where the engineer of the lightning express train can- 
not see a hundred yards ahead to the form that lies 
across the track. He may whistle " down brakes," 
but not soon enough to disappoint the one who seeks 
her death. 



442 



THE GATES OF HELL. 



But you say, " Isn't God good, and won't He for- 
give?" Yes ; but man will not, woman will not, so- 
ciety will not. The Church of God says it will, but 
it will not. Our work, then, must be preventive 
rather than cure. 

Those gates of hell are to be prostrated just as cer- 
tainly as God and the Bible are true, but it will not 
be done until Christian men and women, quitting 
their prudery and squeamishness in this matter, rally 
the whole Christian sentiment of the church and 
assail these great evils of society. The Bible utters 
its denunciation in this direction again and again, and 
yet the piety of the day is such a namby-pamby sort 
of thing that you cannot even quote Scripture with- 
out making somebody restless. As long as this holy 
imbecility reigns in the Church of God, sin will laugh 
you to scorn. I do not know but that before the 
Church wakes up matters will get worse and worse, 
and that there will have to be one lamb sacrificed 
from each of the most carefully guarded folds, and 
the wave of uncleanness dash to the spire of the vil- 
lage church and the top of the cathedral pillar. 

Prophets and patriarchs, and apostles and evangel- 
ists, and Christ Himself have thundered against these 
sins as against no other, and yet there are those who 
think we ought to take, when we speak of these sub- 
jects, a tone apologetic. I put my foot on all the 
conventional rhetoric on this subject, and I tell you 
plainly that unless you give up that sin your doom is 
sealed, and world without end you will be chased by 
the anathemas of an incensed God. I rally you to a 
besiegement of the gates of hell. We want in this 
besieging host no soft sentimentalists, but men who 
are willing to give and take hard knocks. The gates 



THE GATES OF HELL. 



443 



of Ghaza were carried off ; the gates of Thebes were 
battered down ; the gates oi Babylon were destroyed, 
and the gates of hell are going to be prostrated. 

The Christianized printing press will be rolled up 
as the chief battering-ram. Then there will be a long 
list of aroused pulpits, which shall be assailing fort- 
resses, and God's red-hot truth shall be the flying 
ammunition of the contest ; and the sappers and the 
miners will lay the train under these foundations of 
sin, and at just the right time God, who leads on the 
fray, will cry, " Down with the gates ! " and the ex- 
plosion beneath will be answered by all the trumpets 
of God on high, celebrating universal victory. 

But there may be one wanderer that would like to 
have a kind word calling homeward. I have told 
you that society has no mercy. Did I hint, at an 
earlier point in this subject, that God will have mercy 
upon any wanderer who would like to come back to 
the heart of infinite love ? 

A cold Christmas night in a farmhouse. Father 
comes in from the barn, knocks the snow from his 
shoes, and sits down by the fire. The mother sits at 
the stand knitting. She says to him, "Do you re- 
member it is the anniversary to-night? " The father 
is angered. He never wants any allusion to the fact 
that one had gone away, and the mere suggestion 
that it was the anniversary of that sad event made 
him quite rough, although the tears ran down his 
cheeks. The old house dog, that had played with 
the wanderer when she was a child, comes up and 
puts his head on the old man's knee, but he roughly 
repulses the dog. He wants nothing to remind him 
of the anniversary day. 

A cold winter night in a city church. It is Christ- 



444 



THE GATES OF HELL. 



mas night. They have been decorating the sanctuary. 
A lost wanderer of the street, with thin shawl about 
her, attracted by the warmth and light, comes in and 
sits near the door. The minister of religion is preach- 
ing of Him who was wounded for our transgressions 
and bruised for our iniquities, and the poor soul by 
the door said : " Why, that must mean me ; ' mercy 
for the chief of sinners ; bruised for our iniquities ; 
wounded for our transgressions.' " 

The music, that night in the sanctuary brought 
back the old hymn which she used to sing when, 
with father and mother, she worshiped God in the 
village church. The service over, the minister went 
down the aisle. She said to him : "Were those words 
forme? 'Wounded for our transgressions.' Was that 
for me ?" The man of God understood her not. He 
knew not how to comfort a shipwrecked soul, and he 
passed on and he passed out. The poor wanderer 
followed into the street. 

"What are you doing here, Meg?" said the police. 
"What are you doing here to-night?" "Oh," she re- 
plied, "I was in to warm myself;" and then the rat- 
tling cough came, and she held to the railing until 
the paroxysm was over. She passed on down the 
street, falling from exhaustion; recovering herself 
again, until after a while she reached the outskirts of 
the city, and passed on into the country road. It 
seemed so familiar ; she kept on the road, and she 
saw in the distance a light in the window. Ah ! that 
light had been gleaming there every night since she 
went away. On that country road she passed until 
she came to the garden gate. She opened it and 
passed up the path where she played in childhood. 
She came to the steps and looked in at the fire on 



THE GATES OF HELL. 



445 



the hearth. Then she put her fingers to the latch. 
Oh, if that door had been locked she would have 
perished on the threshold, for she was near to death ! 
But that door had not been locked since £he time she 
went away. She pushed open the door. She went 
in and lay down on the hearth by the fire. The old 
house-dog growled as he saw her enter, but there was 
something in the voice he recognized, and he frisked 
about her .until he almost pushed her down in his joy. 

In the morning the mother came down, and she 
saw a bundle of rags on the hearth ; but when the 
face was uplifted, she knew it, and it was no more 
old Meg of the street. Throwing her arms around 
the returned prodigal, she cried, "Oh, Maggie !" The 
child threw her arms around her mother's neck, and 
said, "Oh, mother !" and while they were embraced 
a rugged form towered above them. It was the 
father. The severity all gone out of his face, he 
stooped and took her up tenderly and carried her to 
mother's room, and laid her down on mother's bed, 
for she was dying. Then the lost one, looking up 
into her mother's face, said : " 'Wounded for our 
transgressions, and bruised for our iniquities !' 
Mother, do you think that means me?" "Oh, yes, 
my darling," said the mother. "If mother is so glad 
to get you back, don't you think God is glad to get 
you back?" 

And there she lay dying, and all their dreams and 
all their prayers were filled with the words, "Wounded 
for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities," 
until, just before the moment of her departure, her 
face lighted up, showing the pardon of God had 
dropped upon her soul. And there she slept away 
on the bosom of a pardoning Jesus. So the Lord 
took back one whom the world rejected. 



CHAPTER XLVI. 



INFLUENCE OF CLUBS. 

I am asked what is the influence of club-houses in 
America ? Men are gregarious. 

Cattle in herds. Birds in flocks. Fish in schools. 
The human race in social circles. You may by dis- 
charge of gun scatter the flock of quails, and you 
may by plunge of the anchor send apart the denizens 
of the deep; but they will reassemble. And if by 
some power you could scatter all the present associa- 
tions of men, they would again reassemble. 

Herbs and flowers prefer to stand in associations. 
You plant a forget-me-not or a heart's-ease away up 
alone on the hillside, and it will soon hunt up some 
other heart's-ease or forget-me-not, You find the 
herbs talking to each other in the morning dew. A 
galaxy of stars is a mutual life insurance company. 
Once in a while you find a man unsympathetic and 
alone, and like a ship's mast, ice-glazed, which the 
most agile sailor could not climb ; but the most of 
men have in their nature a thousand roots and a 
thousand branches, and they blossom all the way to 
the top, and the fowls of heaven sing amid the 
branches. Because of this we have communities 
and societies — some for the kindling of mirth, some 
for the raising of sociality, some for the advance of 
a craft, some to plan for the welfare of the State — 
associations of artists, of merchants, of shipwrights, 

446 



INFLUENCE OF CLUBS. 



447 



of carpenters, of masons, of plumbers, of plasterers, 
of lawyers, of doctors, of clergymen. Do you cry 
out against this ? Then you cry out against a divine 
arrangement. 

You might as well preach a sermon to a busy ant- 
hill or beehive against secret societies. In many of 
the ages people have gathered together in associa- 
tions, characterized by the old blunt Saxon desig- 
nation of club. If you have read history you know 
there were the King's Head Club, and the Ben 
Jonson Club, and the Brothers' Club — to which 
Swift and Bolingbroke belonged — and the Literary 
Club, which Burke and Goldsmith and Johnson and 
Boswell made immortal ; and Jacobin Club, and Ben- 
jamin Franklin Junto Club, and others almost as cel- 
ebrated and conspicuous. Some to advance arts, 
some to vindicate justice, some to promote good 
literature, some to destroy the body and blast the 
soul. In our own time we have many clubs. They 
are as different from each other as the day from the 
night. I might show you two specimens. 

Here is the imperial hallway. On this side is the 
parlor, with the upholstery of a Kremlin or a 
Tuilleries. Here is a dining-room which challenges 
you to mention any luxury it cannot afford. Here is 
an art gallery with pictures and statues and drawings 
from the best of artists — Bierstadt and Church and 
Cole and Powers — pictures for all moods, impas- 
sioned or placid — Sheridan's Ride and Farmers at 
their Nooning. Shipwreck and Sunlight over the 
Seas. Foaming deer with the hounds after it in the 
Adirondacks. Sheep asleep on the hill-side. And 
here are reading rooms with the finest of magazines, 
and libraries with all styles of books, from herme- 
neutics to fairy tale. 



448 



INFLUENCE OF CLUBS. 



Men go there for ten minutes or for many hours. 
Some come from beautiful and happy home circles 
for a little while that they may enter into these club- 
house socialities. Others come from dismembered 
nouseholds, and while they have humble lodgings 
elsewhere, find their chief joy here. One blackball 
amid ten votes will defeat a man's membership. For 
rowdyism and gambling and drunkenness and every 
style of misdemeanor a man is immediately dropped. 
Brilliant club-house from top to bottom — the chan- 
deliers, the plate, the literature, the social prestige a 
complete enchantment. 

Here is another club-house. You open the door, 
and the fumes of strong drink and tobacco are some- 
thing almost intolerable. You do not have to ask 
what those young men are doing, for you can see by 
the flushed cheek and intent look and almost angry 
way of tossing the dice and dropping the chips, they 
are gambling. 

That is an only son seated there at another table. 
He had had all art, all culture, all refinement, show- 
ered upon him by his parents. That is the way he 
is paving them for their kindness. That is a young 
married man. A few months ago, he made promises 
of fidelity and kindness, every one of which he has 
broken. Around a table in the club-house there is a 
group telling vile stories. It is getting late now, and 
three-fourths of the members of the club are intoxi- 
cated. It is between twelve and one o'clock, and 
after a while it is time to shut up. The conversation 
has got to be groveling, base, filthy, outrageous. 
Time to shut up. The young men saunter forth, 
those who can walk, and balance themselves against 
the lamp-post or the fence. A young man not able 



INFLUENCE OF CLUBS. 449 

to get out has a couch extemporized for him in the 
club-house, or by two comrades not quite so over- 
come by strong drink, he is led to his father's house, 
and the door-bell rung, and the door opens, and 
these two imbecile escorts usher into the front hall 
the ghastliest thing ever ushered into a father's house 
— a drunken son. There are dissipating club-houses 
which would do well if they could make a contract 
with Inferno to furnish ten thousand men a year, and 
do that for twenty years, on the condition that no 
more would be asked of them. They would save — 
the dissipating club-houses of this country w T ould 
save — hundreds of homesteads, and bodies, minds, 
and souls innumerable. The ten thousand they fur- 
nish a year by contract would be small when com- 
pared with the vaster multitudes they furnish with- 
out contract. But I make a vast difference between 
the club-houses. I have during my life belonged to 
four clubs — a base-ball club, a theological club, and 
two literary clubs. They were to me physical recup- 
eration, mental food, moral health. 

Now, what is the principle by which we are to 
judge in regard to the profitable or baleful influence 
of a club-house? That is the practical and the 
eternal question which hundreds of men to-day are 
settling. First, I would have you test your club- 
house by the influence it has upon your home, if you 
have a home. I have been told by a prominent 
member of one of the clubs, that three-fourths of the 
members are married men. That wife has lost her 
influence over her husband who takes, every eve- 
ning's absence as an assault upon domesticity. How 
are the great enterprises of art, and literature, and 
education, and the public weal to go on if every man 

29 



450 



INFLUENCE OF CLUBS. 



has his world bounded by his front doorstep on one 
side, and his back window on the other, his thoug-hts 
rising no higher than his own attic, going down no 
deeper than his own cellar? When a wife objects to 
a husband's absence for some elevating purpose, she 
breaks her scepter of conjugal power. 

There should be no protest on the part of the wife 
if the husband goes forth to some practical, useful, 
honorable mission. But alas! for the fact that so 
many men sacrifice all home-life for the club-house. 
I have in my house the roll of the members of many 
of the clubs of our great cities, and I could point you 
to the names of many who have committed this 
awful sacrilege. 

Genial as angels at the club-house, ugly as sin at 
home. Generous to a fault for all wine suppers and 
yachts and horse races, but stingy about the wife's 
dress and the children's shoes. That which might 
have been a healthful recreation has become a usurp- 
ation of his affections, and he has married it, and he 
is guilty of moral bigamy. 

Under that process, whatever be the wife's features, 
she becomes uninteresting and homely. He criticises 
everything about her. He does not like her dress ; 
he does not like the way she arranges her hair ; he 
cannot see how he ever was so unromantic as to offer 
her his hand and heart. It is all the time talk about 
money, money, money, when she ought to be talking 
about Dexters and Derby Days and English drags, 
with six horses all under control of one ribbon. 
There are hundreds of homes in New York and 
Brooklyn being clubbed to death. 

Membership in some of these clubs always means 
domestic shipwreck. Tell me a man has become a 



INFLUENCE OF CLUBS. 



member in a certain club, and tell me nothing more 
about him for ten years, and I will write his accurate 
biography. By that time he is a wine-guzzler, and 
his wife is broken-hearted or prematurely old, and 
his property is lost or reduced, and his home is a 
mere name in a directory. 

" Here are six days of the secular week," says the 
husband and father. " How shall I dispose of the 
six nights ? Well, I will . give four to my family at 
home, or taking them abroad to some place where 
they will be interested. Then I will give one night 
to a religious service, and I will give one night to a 
club-room." I congratulate you. But here is a man 
who makes a different distribution of his time. He 
says : " I will give three nights to the club-room, and 
I will give three nights to other duties." I begin to 
tremble. Here is a man who makes a different distri- 
bution of his time. He says : " Of the six secular 
nights, I will give five to the club-house, and one to 
my home, and that one night I will spend in scowling 
like a March squall because I am not spending it as I 
spent the others." That man's obituary is written. 
There is not one man out of ten thousand that gets 
as far as that on the road to ruin that ever stops. 
His physical health gives way under the late hours 
and the stimulants. He is an easy prey for erysipelas 
and rheumatism of the heart. The physician at one 
glance sees that he will not only have that disease to 
fight, but many years of fast living. The clergyman 
at the obsequies talks in religious generalities. The 
men who got his yacht in the eternal rapids will not 
come to the obsequies. Oh, no, they will have press- 
ing engagements ! They will send the wife with a 
wreath for the coffin-lid, and a few words of sym- 



452 



INFLUENCE OF CLUBS. 



pathy, but they will be busy. Give me a chisel and 
a mallet that I may cut the man's epitaph on his 
tombstone : " Blessed are the dead who die in the 
Lord, for they rest from their labors, and their works 
do follow them." " Oh, no," you say, " that would 
not be appropriate." Let me try again with this epi- 
taph : " Let me die the death of the righteous, and 
let my last end be like his." " Oh, no," you say, 
" that would be horribly inappropriate." Then give 
me the chisel and the mallet, and I will cut an honest 
epitaph : " Here lies the victim of a dissipating club- 
house." 

The damage is often increased by the fact that the 
scion of some aristocratic family belongs to a club, 
and people born in humbler circles feel flattered to 
belong to that one where he belongs, not realizing 
the fact that some of the sons and grandsons of the 
great commercial establishments of the past as to 
mind are imbecile, as to body diseased, as to morals 
rotten. They would have long ago got through with 
their entire property, but the wily ancestor who got 
his money by hard knocks knows how it will be, and 
so he ties up everything in his will. There is nothing 
left now to that unworthy descendant but his grand- 
father's name and roast beef rotundity. And yet 
many a steamer is proud to be lashed fast of that 
worm-eaten tug, though it pulls straight for the 
breakers. I can point you to men in Brooklyn and 
New York who, because of an illustrious ancestry, 
are now taking scores of men to their eternal ruin. 

Another test by which you may try your club- 
house, or the one into whose membership you are 
invited, is the question, What is the influence of .that 
institution upon one's secular occupation ? I can see 



INFLUENCE OF CLUBS. 



453 



how through a club-house men may advance their 
commercial interests. I have friends who have 
formed their best mercantile relations through such 
institutions. But what has been the influence of the 
one with which you are connected upon your wordly 
credit ? 

Are people more cautious now how they let you 
have goods ? Before you joined the club was your 
credit with the commercial agency Ai ? and has it 
gone clear down on the scale ? Then beware ! 

We every day hear the going to pieces of com- 
mercial establishments through the dissipations of 
some club-house libertine or club-house drunkard 
who has wasted his estate, and wasted the estate of 
others. The fortune is beaten to pieces with the ball- 
player's bat, or cut amidship by the prow of a 
regatta, or falls under the sharp hoof of the fast 
horse, or is drowned in the potions of Cognac and 
Mononghahela. The man's club-house was the Loch 
Earn, his occupation was the Ville du Havre. They 
struck on the high seas, and the Ville du Havre went 
under. 

Another test by which you may try all the club- 
houses of these cities is the question, What influence 
will that institution have upon my sense of moral 
and spiritual obligation ? 

I have sometimes been perplexed, as some of you 
have been, at Buffalo, going to Chicago, to know 
whether to take the Michigan Central or the Lake 
Shore, equally safe, equally expeditious, trains arriv- 
ing at the same hour ; but suppose you hear that on 
one road the bridges are down, the tracks are torn 
up, and the switches are unlocked, you very easily 
make up your mind which is the best to take. 



454 INFLUENCE OF CLUBS. 

Now, here are two highways into the great future, 
the Christian highway and the unchristian; the one 
safe, the other dangerous. Anything that makes me 
forget that, is a bad institution. I had family prayers 
before I joined the club. Do I have them now ? I 
attended regularly the house of God before I joined 
• the club. Do I now attend religious service? Would 
you rather have in your hand, when you come to 
die, a pack of cards or a Bible ? Would you, in the 
closing moment of your life, rather have the cup of 
Belshazzarean wassail put to your lip, or the cup of 
holy communion ? Would you, my brother, rather 
have for eternal companions the swearing, carousing, 
vile, story-telling crew that surround the table in a 
dissipating^ club-house, or your little child, the bright 
girl that God took? Ah! you would not have been 
away so many nights if you had thought she was 
going so soon. Your wife has never brightened up 
since then. She has not got over it. She never will 
get over it. What a pity it is that you can not spend 
more evenings at home consoling that great sorrow ! 
Oh, you can not drown that grief in a wine-cup ! 
You can not forget those little arms that were thrown 
around your neck while she said : "Papa, do stay 
home to-night, do stay home to-night!" You can 
not wipe from your lips the dying kiss of that little 
child. And yet there has been many a man so com- 
pletely overborne by the fascinations of a dissipating 
club-house, that he went off the night the child was 
dying of scarlet fever. He came back about mid- 
night, and it was all over. The eyes were closed. 
The undertaker had done his work. The wife lay 
unconscious in the next room, from having watched 
for three weeks. He came up-stairs, and he saw the 



INFLUENCE OF CLUBS. 



455 



empty cradle, and saw the window was up. He said, 
"What is the matter?" In God's judgment day he 
will find out what was the matter. Oh, man astray, 
God help you ! 

The influence which some of the club-houses are 
exerting is the more to be deplored because it takes 
down the very best men. 

The admission fee sifts out the penurious, and 
leaves only the best fellows. They are frank, they 
are generous, they are whole-souled, they are talented. 
Oh, I begrudge the devil such a prize ! After a 
while the frank look will go out of the face, and the 
features will be haggard, and when talking to you, 
instead of looking you in the eye they will look 
down, and every morning the mother will kindly ask, 
"My son, what kept you out so late last night?" and 
he will make no answer, or he will say, " That's my 
business." Then some time he will come to the store 
or the bank cross and befogged, and he will neglect 
some duty, and after a while he will lose his place, 
and then, with nothing to do, he will come down at 
ten o'clock in the morning to curse the servant be- 
cause the breakfast is cold. The lad who was a clerk 
in the cellar has got to be chief clerk in the great 
commercial establishment ; the young man who ran 
errands for the bank has got to be cashier ; thou- 
sands of the young men who were at the foot of the 
ladder have got to the top of the ladder ; but here 
goes the victim of the dissipating club-house, with 
staggering step and bloodshot eye and mud-spattered 
hat set sidewise on a shock of greasy hair, his cravat 
dashed with cigar ashes. Look at him ! Pure-hearted 
young man, look at him ! The club-house did that. 
I know one such who went the whole round, and, 



456 



INFLUENCE OF CLUBS. 



turned out of the higher club-houses, went into the 
lower club-houses, and on down, until one night 
he leaped out of a third-story window to end his 
wretchedness. 

Let me say to fathers who are becoming dissipated, 
your sons will follow you. You think your son does 
not know. He knows all about it. I have heard 
men who say, " I am profane, but never in the pres- 
ence of my children." Your children know you 
swear. I have heard men say, " I drink, but never in 
the presence of my children." Your children know 
you drink. I describe now what occurs in hundreds 
of households in this country. The tea-hour has 
arrived. The family are seated at the tea-table. Be- 
fore the rest of the family arise from the table, the 
father shoves back his chair, says he has an engage- 
ment, lights a cigar, goes out, comes back after mid- 
night, and that is the history of three hundred and 
sixty-five nights of the year. Does any man want to 
stultify himself by saying that that is healthy, that 
that is right, that that is honorable ? Would your 
wife have married you with such prospects ? 

Time will pass on, and the son will be sixteen or 
seventeen years of age, and you will be at the tea- 
table, and he will shove back and have an engage- 
ment, and he will light his cigar, and he will go out 
to the club-house, and you will hear nothing of him 
until you hear the night key in the door after mid- 
night. But his physical constitution is not quite so 
strong as yours, and the liquor he drinks is more ter- 
rifically drugged than that which you drink, and so 
he will catch up with you on the road to death, 
though you got such a long start of him, and so you 
will both go to hell together. 



INFLUENCE OF CLUBS. 457 

The revolving Drummond light in front of a hotel, 
in front of a locomotive, may flash this way, and flash 
that, upon the mountains, upon the ravines, upon the 
city ; but I take the lamp of God's eternal truth, and 
I flash it upon all the club-houses of these cities, so 
that no young man shall be deceived. By these tests 
try them, try them ! Oh, leave the dissipating in- 
fluences of the club-room, if the influences of your 
club-room are dissipating ! Paid your money, have 
you? Better sacrifice that than your soul. Good 
fellows, are they ? Under that process they will not 
remain such. Mollusca may be found two hundred 
fathoms down beneath the Norwegian seas ; Siberian 
stag get fat on the stunted growth of Altain peaks ; 
Hedysarium grows amid the desolation of Sahara; 
« tufts of osier and birch grow on the hot lips of vol- 
canic Sneehattan ; but a pure heart and an honest life 
thrive in a dissipating club-house — never ! 

The way to conquer a wild beast is to keep your 
eye on him, but the way for you to conquer your 
temptations, my friend, is to turn your back on them 
and fly for your life. 

Oh, my heart aches ! I see men struggling against 
evil habits, and they want help. I have knelt beside 
them, and I have heard them cry for help, and then 
we have risen, and he has put one hand on my right 
shoulder, and the other hand on my left shoulder, 
and looked into my face with an infinity of earnest- 
ness which the judgment day will have no power to 
make me forget, as he has cried out with his lips 
scorched in ruin, " God help me ! " For such there 
is no help except in the Lord God Almighty. To 
His grace I commend you. 



CHAPTER XLVII. 

HEALTH RESORTS. 

I believe in watering-places. I go there some- 
times. Let not the commercial firm begrudge the 
clerk, or the employer the journeyman, or the patient 
the physician, or the church its pastor, a season of in- 
occupation. Luther used to sport with his children ; 
Edmund Burke used to caress his favorite horse ; 
Thomas Chalmers, in the dark hour of the Church's 
disruption, played kite for recreation — so I was told 
by his own daughter — and the busy Christ said to the 
busy apostles, " Come ye apart awhile into the 
desert and rest yourselves." And I have observed 
that they who do not know how to rest, do not know 
how to work. 

But I have to declare this truth, that some of our 
fashionable watering-places are the temporal and 
eternal destruction of " a multitude that no man can 
number." The first temptation that is apt to hover in 
this direction is to leave your piety at home. 

You will send the dog and cat and canary-bird to ■ 
be well cared for somewhere else ; but the tempta- 
tion will be to leave your religion in the room with 
the blinds down and the door bolted, and then you 
will come back in the autumn to find that it is 
starved and suffocated, lying stretched on the rug, 
stark dead, There is no surplus of piety at the 
watering-places. I never knew any one to grow 

458 



HEALTH RESORTS. 



461 



very rapidly in grace at the Catskill Mountain 
House, or Sharon Springs, or the Falls of Mont- 
morency. It is generally the case that the Sabbath 
is more of a carousal than any other day, and there 
are Sunday walks, Sunday rides, and Sunday 
excursions. 

Elders and deacons and ministers of religion, who 
are entirely consistent at home, sometimes when the 
Sabbath dawns on them at Niagara Falls or the 
White Mountains, take the day to themselves. If 
they go to the church, it is apt to be a sacred parade, 
and the discourse, instead of being a plain talk about 
the soul, is apt to be what is called a crack sermon — 
that is, some discourse picked out of the effusions of 
the year as the one most adapted to excite admira- 
tion ; and in those churches, from the way the ladies 
hold their fans, you know that they are not so much 
impressed with the heat as with the picturesqueness 
of half-disclosed features. Four puny souls stand in 
the organ-loft and squall a tune that nobody knows, 
and worshipers, with two thousand dollars' worth 
of diamonds on the right hand, drop a cent into the 
poor-box, and then the benediction is pronounced, 
and the farce is ended. The toughest thing I 
ever tried to do was to be good at a watering-place. 
The air is bewitched with " the world, the flesh, and 
the devil." There are Christians who, in three or 
four weeks in such a place, have had such terrible 
rents made in their Christian robe that they had to 
keep darning it until Christmas, to get it mended. 

The health of a great many people makes an an- 
nual visit to some mineral spring an absolute neces- 
sity ; but, my dear people, take your Bible along 
with you, and take an hour for secret prayer every 



462 



HEALTH RESORTS. 



day, though you be surrounded by guffaw and satur- 
nalia. Keep holy the Sabbath, though they deride 
you as a bigoted Puritan. Stand off from gambling 
hells and those other institutions which propose to 
imitate on this side the water the iniquities oi Baden- 
Baden. Let your moral and your immortal health 
keep pace with your physical recuperation, and re- 
member that all the sulphur and chalybeate springs 
cannot do you so much good as the healing, peren- 
nial flood that breaks forth from the "Rock of Ages." 
This may be your last summer. If so, make it a fit 
vestibule of heaven. 

Another temptation hovering around nearly all our 
watering-places is the horse-racing business. We all 
admire the horse ; but we do not think that its beauty 
or speed ought to be cultured at the expense of 
human degradation. The horse race is not of such 
importance as the human race. The Bible intimates 
that a man is better than a sheep, and I suppose he is 
better than a horse, though like Job's stallion, his 
neck be clothed with thunder. Horse-races in olden 
times were under the ban of Christian people ; and in 
our day the same institution has come up under ficti- 
tious names. And it is called a " Summer Meeting," 
almost suggestive of positive religious exercises* 
And it is called an "Agricultural Fair," suggestive of 
everything that is improving in the art of farming. 
But under these deceptive titles are the same cheat- 
ing, and the same betting, and the same drunkenness, 
and the same vagabondage, and the same abomination 
that were to be found under the old horse-racing 
system. 

I never knew a man yet who could give himself to 
the pleasures of the turf for a long reach of time and 



HEALTH RESORTS. 



463 



not be battered in morals. They hook up their 
spanking- team, and put on their sporting - cap, and 
light their cigar, and take the reins, and dash down 
the road to perdition ! The great day at Saratoga, 
and Long Branch, and Cape May, and nearly all the 
other watering-places is the day of the races. The 
hotels are thronged, every kind of equipage is taken 
up at an almost fabulous price ; and there are many 
respectable people mingling with jockeys and gam- 
blers and libertines, and foul-mouthed men and flashy 
women. 

The bartender stirs up the brandy smash. The 
bets run high. The greenhorns, supposing all is fair, 
put in their money, soon enough to lose it. Three 
weeks before the race takes place, the struggle is de- 
cided, and the men in the secret know on which steed 
to bet their money. The two men on the horses rid- 
ing around, long ago arranged who shall win. Lean- 
ing from the stand, or from the carriage, are men and 
women so absorbed in the struggle of bone and 
muscle and mettle, that they make a grand harvest 
for the pickpockets who carry off the pocketbooks 
and the portemonnaies. Men, looking on, see only 
two horses with two riders flying around the ring ; 
but there is many a man on that stand whose honor 
and domestic happiness and fortune — white mane, 
white foot, white flank — are in the ring, racing Avith 
inebriety, and with fraud, and with profanity, and 
with ruin — black neck, black foot, black flank. Neck 
and neck they go in that moral Epsom. White horse 
of honor ; black horse of ruin. Death says, " I will 
bet on the black horse." Spectator says, " I will bet 
on the white horse." The white horse of honor a 
little way ahead. The black horse of ruin, Satan 



464 



HEALTH RESORTS. 



mounted, all the time gaining on him. Spectator 
breathless. They put on the lash, dig in the spurs. 
There ! They are past the stand. Sure. Just as I 
expected it. The black horse of ruin has won the 
race, and all the galleries of darkness " Huzza ! 
huzza ! " and the devils come in to pick up their 
wagers. Ah, my friends, have nothing to do with 
horse-racing dissipations. Long ago the English 
Government got through looking to the turf for the 
dragoon and the light-cavalry horse. They found 
out that the turf depreciates the stock ; and it is 
worse yet for men. Thomas Hughes, the Member of 
Parliament, and the author, known all the world over, 
hearing that a new turf enterprise was being started 
in this country, wrote a letter in which he said, 
" Heaven help you, then ; for of all the cankers of 
our old civilization there is nothing in this country 
approaching in unblushing meanness, in rascality, 
holding its head high, to this belauded institution of 
the British turf." 

Another famous sportsman writes : " How many 
fine domains have been shared among these hosts of 
rapacious sharks during the last two hundred years ; 
and unless the system be altered, how many more are 
doomed to fall into the same gulf! " With the bull- 
fights of Spain and the bear-baitings of the pit, may 
the Lord God annihilate the infamous and accursed 
horse racing of England and America. 

1 go further and speak of another temptation that 
hovers over the watering place, and that is the 
temptation to sacrifice physical strength. 

The modern Bethesda was intended to recuperate 
the physical health ; and yet how many come from 
the watering-places, their health absolutely destroyed! 



HEALTH RESORTS. 



465 



New York and Brooklyn simpletons, boasting of hav- 
ing imbibed twenty glasses of Congress water before 
breakfast. Families, accustomed to going to bed at 
ten o'clock at night, gossiping until one or two 
o'clock in the morning. Dyspeptics, usually very 
cautious about their health, mingling ice-creams and 
lemons and lobster salads and cocoanuts, until the 
gastric juices lift up all their voices of lamentation and 
protest. Delicate women and brainless young men 
dancing themselves into vertigo and catalepsy. 
Thousands of men and women coming back from 
our watering-places in the autumn with the founda- 
tions laid for ailments that will last them all their life 
long. 

You know as well as I do that this is the simple 
truth. In the summer, you say to your good health : 
" Good-bye ; I am going to have a gay time now for 
a little while ; I will be very glad to see you again in 
the autumn." Then in the autumn, when you are 
hard at work in your office, or store, or shop, or 
counting-room, Good Health will come in and say, 
" Good-bye ; I am going." You say : " Where are 
you going? " "Oh," says Good Health, " I am going 
to take a vacation." It is a poor rule that will not 
work both ways, and your good health will leave 
you choleric and splenetic and exhausted. You co- 
quetted with your good health in the summer time, 
and your good health is coquetting with you in the 
winter time. A fragment of Paul's charge to the 
jailor would be an appropriate inscription for the 
hotel register in every watering-place : " Do thyself 
no harm." 

Another temptation hovering around the watering- 
place is the formation of hasty and life-long alliances. 

30 



4 66 



HEALTH RESORTS. 



The watering-places are responsible for more of the 
domestic infelicities of this country than all other 
things combined. Society is so artificial there that 
no sure judgment of character can be formed. They 
who form companionships amid such circumstances, 
go into a lottery where there are twenty blanks to 
one prize. In the severe tug of life you want more 
than glitter and splash. Life is not a ball-room where 
the music decides the step, and bow and prance and 
graceful swing of long train can make up for strong 
common-sense. You might as well go among the 
gaily-painted yachts of a summer regatta to find war 
vessels, as to go among the light spray of the summer 
watering-place to find character that can stand the 
test of the great struggle of human life. 

Ah, in the battle of life you want a stronger weapon 
than a lace fan or a croquet mallet. The load of life 
is so heavy that in order to draw it you want a team 
stronger than one made up of a masculine grass- 
hopper and a feminine butterfly. If there is any man 
in the community that excites my contempt, and that 
ought to excite the contempt of every man and 
woman, it is the soft-handed, soft-headed dude who, 
perfumed until the air is actually sick, spends his 
summer in making killing attitudes, and waving senti- 
mental adieux, and talking infinitesimal nothings, and 
finding his heaven in the set of a lavender kid glove. 
Boots are tight as an inquisition. Two hours of "con- 
summate skill exhibited in the tie of a flaming cravat. 
His conversation made up of "Ahs !" and "Ohs!" and 
"He hes!" 

There is only one counterpart to such a man as 
that, and that is the frothy young woman at the 
watering-place ; her conversation made up of French 



HEALTH RESORTS. 



467 



moonshine ; what she has in her head only equaled 
by what she has on her back ; useless ever since she 
was born, and to be useless until she is dead, useless 
until she becomes an intelligent Christian. We may 
admire music, and fair faces, and graceful step ; but 
amid the heartlessness, and the inflation, and the fan- 
tastic influences of our modern watering-places, be- 
ware how you make life-long covenants. 

Another temptation that will hover over the 
watering-place is that of baneful literature. 

Almost every one starting off for the summer, takes 
some reading matter. It is a book out of the library, 
or off the bookstand, or bought of the boy hawking 
books through the cars. I really believe there is 
more pestiferous trash read among the intelligent 
classes in July and August, than in all the other ten 
months of the year. Men and women who at home 
would not be satisfied with a book that was not 
really sensible, I find sitting on hotel piazza, or under 
the trees, reading books the index of which would 
make them blush if they knew that you knew what 
the book was. "Oh," they say, " you must have in- 
tellectual recreation." Yes. There is no need that 
you take along into a watering-place " Hamilton's 
Metaphysics," or some ponderous discourse on the 
eternal decrees, or " Faraday's Philosophy." There 
are many easy books that are good. You might as 
well say, " I propose now to give a little rest to my 
digestive organs, and instead of eating heavy meat 
and vegetables, I will, for a little while, take lighter 
food — a little strychnine and a few grains of rats- 
bane." Literary poison in August is as bad as liter- 
ary poison in December. Mark that. Do not let 
the frogs and the lice of a corrupt printing-press 



468 



HEALTH RESORTS. 



jump and crawl into your Saratoga trunk or White 
Mountain valise. 

Are there not good books that are easy to read — 
books of entertaining travel ; books of congenial 
history ; books of pure fun ; books of poetry, ring- 
ing with merry canto ; books of fine engraving ; 
books that will rest the mind as well as purify the 
heart and elevate the whole life? My hearers, there 
will not be an hour between this and the day of your 
death when you can afford to read a book lacking in 
moral principle. 

Another temptation hovering all around our water- 
ing-places is intoxicating beverages. I am told that 
it is becoming more and more fashionable for women 
to drink. I care not how well a woman may dress ; 
if she has taken enough of wine to flush her cheek 
and put a glassiness on her eye, she is drunk. She 
may be handed into a $2,500 carriage, and have dia- 
monds enough to confound the Tiffanys — she is 
drunk. She may be a graduate of Packer Institute, 
and the daughter of some man in danger of being 
nominated for the presidency — she is drunk. You 
may have a larger vocabulary than I have, and you 
may say in regard to her that she is " convivial," or 
she is " merry," or she is " festive," or she is " exhila- 
rated ; " but you cannot, with all your garlands of 
verbiage, cover up the plain fact that it is an old- 
fashioned case of drunk. 

Now the watering-places are full of temptations to 
men and women to tipple. At the close of the ten- 
pin or billiard game they tipple. At the close of the 
cotillion they tipple. Seated on the piazza cooling 
themselves off, they tipple. The tinged glasses come 
around with bright straws, and they tipple. First, 



HEALTH RESORTS. 469 

they take " light wines," as the)^ call them ; but 
" light wines " are heavy enough to debase the appe- 
tite. There is not a very long road between cham- 
pagne at five dollars a bottle and whiskey at ten 
cents a glass. Satan has three or four grades down 
which he takes men to destruction. One man he 
takes up, and through one spree pitches him into 
eternal darkness. That is a rare case. Very seldom, 
indeed, can you find a man who will be such a fool as 
that. Satan will take another man to a grade, to a 
descent at an angle about like the Pennsylvania coal- 
shoot or the Mount Washington rail-track, and shove 
him off. But that is very rare. 

When a man goes down to destruction, Satan 
brings him to a plain. It is almost a level. The 
depression is so slight that you can hardly see it. 
The man does not actually know that he is on the 
down grade, and it tips only a little toward darkness 
— just a little. And the first mile it is claret, and the 
second mile it is sherry, and the third mile it is a 
punch, and the fourth mile it is ale, and the fifth mile 
it is porter, and the sixth mile it is brandy, and then 
it gets steeper, and steeper, and steeper, and the man 
gets frightened, and says: " Oh, let me off." "No," 
says the conductor, " this is an express train, and it 
don't stop until it gets to the Grand Central Depot 
of Smashupton ! " Ah, " Look not thou upon the 
wine when it is red, when it giveth his color in the 
cup, when it moveth itself aright. At the last it 
biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder." 

My friends, whether you tarry at home — which 
will be quite as safe, and perhaps quite as com- 
fortable — or go into the country, arm yourself against 
temptation. The grace of God is the only safe 
shelter, whether in town or country. 



CHAPTER XLVIII. 

THE ROLLER-SKATE CRAZE. 

Archimedes eulogized the lever, and he said if he 
had a place for the fulcrum outside of this world on 
which the lever could rest, he could move the world; 
but he found no such resting-place for the fulcrum. 
And it is not the lever that is to lift or sink this world, 
but the wheel, whether the solid disk, or made up of 
the rim, and spokes, and hub. Wheel of rail train, 
accelerating travel ; wheel of printing-press, multiply- 
ing intelligence ; wheel of sewing-machine, alleviating 
toil ; wheel of chronometer, announcing the passage 
of the hours. 

Balance wheel, fly wheel, belt wheel, spur wheel, 
driving wheel, ratchet wheel, the wheel invented by 
whom I know not, but the idea of it is suggested to us 
by the planetary system, which is a wheel, and the 
constellations and the galaxies, which are wheels,- 
and these smaller wheels playing into the great 
wheel of the universe, the axis of which is the pillar 
on which rests the throne of God. Tell me which 
way the world's wheels turn, and I will tell you 
whether it is going toward ransom or ruin. Tell me 
how many revolutions they make in a minute, and I 
will tell you how rapidly it hastens on toward disen- 
thralment or demolition. 

In our day the principle of the wheel has been ap- 
plied to recreations and amusements, and the veloci- 
, 47o 



THE ROLLER-SKATE CRAZE. 473 

pede, and the bicycle, and the tricycle, and the roller 
skate are the consequence, and the thousand-voiced 
question to be met is, "Are the roller-skates wheels 
of help or wheels of ruin ?" Never in your time or 
mine has there been such high, wide, popular agita- 
tion of the question of amusements, and all ministers 
of the Gospel, and all parents, and all young people, 
and all old people need to be able to give an answer 
to these questions, and a right answer, and a reason 
for the answer. 

Let me premise that for the last twenty-five years 
I have been looking for some healthful amusement — 
healthful for the body and the mind — and an amuse- 
ment that would come in time to rescue this genera- 
tion. Of healthful, honest, useful amusement, you 
know as well as I there has been an awful scarcity. 
Plenty of places to blight and blast and consume 
body, mind, and soul. No lack of gambling saloons ! 
Within an hour of every home, and every hotel, and 
every boarding-house in these cities, there are places 
where a young man may get divorced of his money, 
and where the old spider of the gaming table offici- 
ates at the funeral of the innocent flies. You can 
lose ten cents, or you can lose a house and lot, or you 
can lose all you have in a night. Plenty of gambling 
saloons! I do not know a community on earth that 
is lacking in this direction. Plenty of grog-shops, 
where the owner, by expending twelve dollars for 
genuine alcohol, can fix up a mixture that he can sell 
for two hundred. Nice little percentage of profit! 
They let a young man have all he wants al long as 
his money lasts — one glass, two glasses, three glasses, 
four glasses, five glasses, until his money is all gone, 
and it is demonstrated that he has not so much as a 



474 THE ROLLER-SKATE CRAZE. 

postage stamp left, and then they turn him into the 
street to take care of himself, or be helped home by 
some one not quite so intoxicated as himself, for the 
grog-seller never accompanies his victim to his home, 
lest at the door he confront mother or wife, to whom 
the Lord may have lent, for a little while, one of His 
smaller thunderbolts, with which to smite the des- 
poiler into ashes. Plenty of gates of hell, and all of 
them wide open, and temptresses to say, "Come in, 
come in !" But of honest, useful, healthful amuse- 
ments, a great scarcity. 

Seven o'clock P. M., finds tens of thousands of 
young men at their home, or at the hotel, or at the 
boarding-house. The young man says, " How shall I 
spend this evening ? " You say, " Go to prayer-meet- 
ing." Good advice for two nights of the week, and 
add to that the Sabbath night ; subtracting three 
nights for religious purposes, you have four nights 
left for secular purposes. What shall the young man 
do with the four other nights ? You say, " Go and 
hear a lecture on astronomy." But the young man's 
brain is all tired out with running up long lines of 
figures in the account book, or from trying to sell 
goods to people who do not want to buy them, and 
he has no appetite for astronomy. He does not want 
to know anything about other worlds, when he has 
more than he can do to take care of this one. 

Now, you are a good man, you are a good woman, 
you take up a newspaper to tell that young man 
where to go. You will find, if you have ever tried it, 
that the vast majority of the advertisements announce 
places illy ventilated, with depraving companionship, 
and much of the spectacular indecent. Two hours 
and a half in such a place of amusement, and the 



THE ROLLER-SKATE CRAZE. 



475 



young man will come forth with body asphyxiated, 
mind weakened, soul scarred. Continuous enter- 
tainment of that kind makes lively work for underta- 
kers, and gives tragedy of illustration for discourses 
on the text : " The end thereof is death." What our 
young people want is some style of recreation that 
shall help the body and help the mind — something 
that will allow them to be sound asleep at eleven 
o'clock at night, and to. awaken at seven o'clock in 
the morning, or earlier, thoroughly rested. 

We want something for our boys and girls that will 
put them at the goal of manhood and womanhood, 
ready for practical and useful life. Not mere splint- 
ers of humanity, not invalids at nineteen, twenty, and 
twenty-one, not masculine and feminine apologies, 
but ready to command respect, and with their own 
right arm, under God, put aside all obstacles. Now, 
a great many people are asking the question : "Does 
the roller-skate recreation afford this ? " This amuse- 
ment was invented in 1819, by Mr. Plympton, a 
Frenchman, who has been called the " father of the 
rink." He kept a tight grip on the invention of the 
skate until, in 1883, the patent ran out, and now there 
are factories all over the land producing roller skates, 
and every evening there are tens of thousands of peo- 
ple, young, middle-aged, and old, on these wheels, 
good or bad. You ask me if I favor the roller-skate 
exercise ? I reply, Yes, with restrictions, and No, if 
there be no restrictions ; yes, if it be restricted, and 
no, if it be unguarded. In other words, you can 
make it the best thing, or you can make it the worst 
thing. They have already, some of them, been exhil- 
aration to the body — they have given health to the 
sick and enfeebled, and have been innocent hilarity to 



476 



THE ROLLER-SKATE CRAZE. 



a vast multitude. Other of the rinks have broken up 
families, have set surgeons to perform most painful 
operations, have produced life-long ailments, and ever- 
lasting misfortune. There is as much difference be- 
tween skating-rinks as between light and darkness, as 
between heaven and hell. I will not be misunder- 
stood on this subject. 

The skating rink exercise, with proper precautions 
— and I shall show you what they are before I get 
through — the skating-rink exercise, with proper pre- 
cautions, seems tome the most graceful and healthful 
of all amusements and all recreations. It eclipses 
coasting, it eclipses croquet, it eclipses football, and 
lawn-tennis, and skating under moonlight over frozen 
pond, and all the other amusements and recreations, 
that I know of. It is good for the muscles, it is 
good for the nerves, is is good for the lungs, it is 
good for the limbs, it is good for the circulation, it is 
good for the spirits — under proper precautions. It 
has all the advantages of the gymnasium, with more 
exhilaration of spirit ; it has all the advantage of the 
skating pond over which our fathers and mothers 
used to dart, without any danger of breaking through 
the ice ; it has all the exhilaration of outdoor sport, 
without being dependent on the condition of the at- 
mosphere. With proper precautions, I say. 

It would be well if our young men almost every 
night or afternoon of the secular week would take 
one hour for this healthful recreation, and come back 
to their duties again. It would be well if the women 
of America, who decline the brisk walk called the 
" constitutional," which keeps the English women 
roseate and strong, would one hour — one hour of the 
secular afternoon or the secular evening, turn back 



THE ROLLER-SKATE CRAZE. 



477 



on darning and mending" and bread-making and 
housekeeping, and try this exhilarating sport. It 
would bring health to some of these hollow cheeks, 
it would bring to the lack-lustre eye the lost light, it 
would give strength to the worn-out body, it would 
straighten the stooped shoulders and drive away con- 
sumption and merciless neuralgia, and nervous pros- 
tration would be gone forever. The great demand 
in this country is some reasonable, honest, healthful 
recreation for the women of America, who are per- 
ishing for the lack of it. It would be well if the 
young man in the hotel of New York or Brooklyn, 
while during the day he purchases goods for a West- 
ern house, should in the evening just go to a respect- 
able rink and hire a pair of skates, and interfering 
with no one, independent of everybody else, take a 
little of this exercise and go back to his hotel again. 

But while I see the possibilities, the immense pos- 
sibilities of this exercise — more possibilities in it for 
health than any exercise I ever heard of or ever 
dreamed of, it has been the means of destruction to 
body, mind, and soul of a good many. And now 
come the restrictions. 

First of all, let us have no more of the vulgarity or 
immodesty of young women going along the streets 
of these cities unattended and alone to any place of 
amusement, whether it be rink or anything else. Let 
them be chaperoned by mother, or older sister, or 
father, or brother. If in a skating rink a man, with- 
out proper introduction, tips his hat to a lady, let the 
officer of the rink hasten that offender to the door 
and help him down the front steps with all modes of 
accelerating momentum he can think of. If these 
well-dressed devils who haunt skating rinks, and 



478 



THE ROLLER-SKATE CRAZE. 



sometimes stand at church doors, would get their 
quick justice done them, there would be less crime 
abroad and less ruin of society, and more honest 
amusement allowed, and more pure recreation. 

Another remark I have to make, and that is, let not 
the bright lights and enchanting music tempt you to 
senseless prolongation of the amusement. Let there 
be no strife as to who shall be the swiftest skater, or 
shall count up the most fabulous number of circuits. 
Stop when you have got all the health there is in the 
amusement. Remember that the laws of health are 
the laws of God. Keep the Ten Commandments 
written on your nerves, and on your bones, and in 
the tissue of your lips, and on your lungs, and on 
your heart. Remember that at the door of every 
skating rink and every place of amusement, honest or 
dishonest, on every cold night a whole group of 
pneumonias stand ready to escort you to the sepul- 
chre. Cool off before you face the north wind. Ac- 
cept no unwarranted gallantries. 

Let the law that dominates the parlor, dominate the 
place of amusement. And I want all the people to 
understand that the evil 1 hint at is not a character- 
istic of skating rinks any more than of a great many 
other places and a great many other conditions. In 
other words, it is high time that people in this coun- 
try understood that flirtation is damnation. When 
on Broadway, New York, or Fulton street, Brooklyn, 
toward the evening hour, when gentlemen of busi- 
ness are returning from their work, I see the daugh- 
ters of respectable families, with conspicuous behavior 
and a giggle intended to attract masculine attention, 
a horror goes through my soul, and I wonder if their 
parents are at all observant. The vast majority of 



THE ROLLER-SKATE CRAZE. 



479 



those who make everlasting shipwreck carry that 
kind of sail. The pirates of death attack that kind , 
of craft. If I had a voice loud enough to be heard 
from the Penobscot to the Rio Grande I would cry 
out, " Flirtation is damnation ! " 

A craze on any subject is deplorable. Ball-playing, 
which has given to many of us the muscle and the 
strength with which we have gone on to discharge 
the duties of life, has become with many a dementia, 
and the gamblers have clutched it with their fingers, 
and from the innocent game of ball many have gone 
home robbed of their person, worst of all, robbed of 
their morals. Is that anything against ball playing ? 
Boating, which with many of us who lived on the 
banks of rivers resulted in development of chest, 
which has allowed us easy respiration for twenty, 
thirty, forty years, and which would have given stout 
lungs to many who long ago vanished under pulmo- 
nary complaints — innocent boating has been seized up- 
on by college students, who have sacrificed book for 
oar, and brain for muscle. Victors at the boat race, 
dead failures in all the practical business of life. Is 
that anything against boating ? Strip this roller-skate 
excitement of the craze, and substitute* common 
sense. 

There is another very important thing for us all 
to remember — especially those of us who have got 
beyond forty years of age — and that is, we were boys 
and girls once ourselves. From the memory of a 
great many good people that seems to be obliterated. 
Go back forty years, and then think what was neces- 
sary for you then, and what was appropriate for you 
then. Rheumatism is incompetent to give law to 
solid ankles ! You can not expect people to have the 



480 



THE ROLLER-SKATE CRAZE. 



tastes of the aged before they get to thirty. Do not 
go out looking for golden rod and china asters on a 
May morning. These people who have the tastes of 
the aged before they get to the thirties, after a while 
are the people who bore the life out of prayer-meet- 
ings, and turn religion into a sniffling cant, and 
disgust the world with that which ought to be 
attractive. 

Do not forget that we once enjoyed the hilarities 
of life, if indeed we have passed along so far that we 
have forgotten it. Ah ! no, we can not improve on 
God's arrangement. God knew what was best. He 
made them boys and girls, and He intends them to 
stay boys and girls until they are called to some other 
condition. They will come to the tug of life soon 
enough. Do not fee envious of them, do not be jealous 
of them. They have the same battle ahead that we 
are fighting. Let them now cultivate broad shoulders 
and brawny arms and stout health, which will be 
taxed to the utmost long after you and I are under 
the ground. 

Nothing of a secular nature pleases me so well as 
to see the young people laugh and have a good time 
— I mean by that a good innocent time — for I say to 
myself, in a little while all the generation now at the 
front will pass away, and these will come on, and 
they will have the battle of life to fight, and they will 
have burdens to carry, and oh, how many sorrows, 
and annoyances, and vexations ! I rejoice now if 
they have amusement and hilarities. Let all the pro- 
prietors of skating-rinks and all parents unite in one 
grand conspiracy to overthrow the poor health and 
the physical stagnation of our cities, and the bad 
places of amusement will be empty, and the coming 



THE ROLLER-SKATE CRAZE. 



generation will have a vigor rebounding and athletic. 
Oh, that they might all start life with more strength 
of body than we have ! Their battle may be greater 
than our battle has been. As we come on toward 
the great Armageddon the strife is going to be the 
more tremendous. And most certainly we want 
human longevity improved. We want the average 
of human life, instead of thirty, one hundred and fifty. 
Why not? In olden times they lived two hundred, 
three hundred, four hundred, five hundred, six hun- 
dred years. The world ought to be as healthy now 
as it ever was. Many of the marshes have been filled 
up. Medical science has gone forth, and crippled, 
and balked, and destroyed many diseases, and why 
not the average of human life now something like 
what it used to be ? But you know now the way it 
is. By the time we get our education, or learn our 
trade, and get fairly started, we have to quit because 
we are emeritus. We fall at the opening of the 
great war of existence instead of at the close, at Bull 
Run instead of Gettysburg. 

I want all to understand that our amusements and 
recreations are merely intended to fit us for use- 
fulness. 

I hope that none ol you, my friends, have fallen 
into the delusion that your mission in life is to enjoy 
vourself. You just hand me a list of the people you 
find at all hours of day and night at places of entertain- 
ment, and in one minute I will give you a list of the 
people who are sacrificing themselves for both worlds. 
Pepper, and salt, and sugar, and cinnamon are very 
important, but that would be a very unhealthful re- 
past that had nothing else on the table. Amusements 
and recreations are the spice and condiment of the 



31 



482 THE ROLLER-SKATE CRAZE. 

great banquet. But some of you over-pleasuring 
people are feeding the body and soul on condiments. 
Ah ! it is only those who have work, to do, and are 
doing it well — it is only such persons who are really 
entitled to the amusements and recreations of this 
life. I know many people think this is a sarcastic 
passage which says, " Rejoice, O young man, in thy 
youth, and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy 
youth, but know thou that for all these things God 
will bring thee into judgment." It is not sarcastic, it 
is not ironical ; it simply means to say, have a good 
time, have a real good time, but do not go into any- 
thing that will be affrighted by the judgment throne, 
do not forget your duties, do not forget you are im- 
mortal. We are to make these recreations of life 
preparations for practical usefulness. 

Solon made a law that once every year ever}' man 
should show by what trade or occupation he got his 
living, and if he could not show some trade or occu- 
pation by which he got his living, he was imprisoned 
and punished as a thief. In olden time when a man 
wanted to become a Roman citizen the officer of the 
law would take his hand and feel it ; and if the hand 
felt hard, the conclusion was that the man was indus- 
trious ; and if the hand felt soft, the conclusion was 
he was idle. While in our time many a diligent man 
has a soft hand for the reason that his toil is with the 
brain, and hence the palm does not get calloused, 
nevertheless we must all have some earnest work to 
do, and we must concentration that work. We must 
make our amusements a re-enforcement of our capac- 
ity. My brother, if at the close of any recreation or 
amusement you go home at night and cannot go down 
on your knees and say, " O Lord, bless the amuse- 



THE ROLLER-SKATE CRAZE. 



483 



ment and 'entertainment of this night to my better 
qualification for usefulness ! " that is an amusement in 
which you ought not to have engaged. Living is a 
tremendous affair, and alas ! for the man who makes 
recreation a depletion instead of an augmentation. 



CHAPTER XLIX. 



TOBACCO AND OPIUM. 

The two first born of our earth were the grass 
blade and the herb. They preceded the brute cre- 
ation and the human family — the grass for the animal 
creation, the herb for human service. The cattle 
'came and took possession of their inheritance, the 
grass-blade ; man came and took possession of his in- 
heritance, the herb. We have the herb for food as in 
case of hunger, for narcotic as in case of insomnia, 
for anodyne as in case of paroxysm, for stimulant as 
when the pulses flag under the weight of disease. 
The caterer comes and takes the herb and presents 
it in all styles of delicacy. The physician comes and 
takes the herb and compounds it for physical recupe- 
ration. Millions of people come and take the herb 
for ruinous physical and intellectual delectation. 
The herb, which was divinely created, and for good 
purposes, has often been degraded for bad results. 
There is a useful and a baneful employment of the 
herbaceous kingdom. 

There sprang up in Yucatan, of this continent, an 
herb that has bewitched the world. In the fifteenth 
century it crossed the Atlantic Ocean and captured 
Spain. Afterward it captured Portugal. Then the 
French ambassadors took it to Paris, and it captured 
the French Empire. Then Walter Raleigh took it to 
London, and it captured Great Britain. Nicotiana, 

484 



TOBACCO AND OPIUM. 



485 



ascribed to that genus by the botanists, but we all 
know it is the exhilarating, elevating, emparadising, 
nerve-shattering, dyspepsia-breeding, health-destroy- 
ing tobacco. I shall not in my remarks be offensively 
personal, because you all use it, or nearly all ! I know 
by experience how it soothes and roseates the world, 
and kindles sociality, and I also know some of its 
baleful results. I was its slave, and by the grace of 
God I have become its conqueror. Tens of thou- 
sands of people have been asking the question during 
the past two months, asking it with great pathos and 
great earnestness : "Does the use of tobacco produce 
cancerous and other troubles?" I shall not answer 
the question in regard to any particular case, but 
shall deal with the subject in a more general way. 

You say to me, "Did God not create tobacco?" 
Yes. You say to me, "Is not God good?" Yes. 
Well, then, you say, "If God is good, and He created 
tobacco, He must have created it for some good pur- 
pose." Yes, your logic is complete. But God cre- 
ated the common sense at the same time, by which 
we are to know how to use a poison, and how not to 
use it. God created that just as He created henbane 
and mix vomica, and copperas, and belladonna, and 
all other poisons, whether directly created by Him- 
self or extracted by man. 

That it is a poison no man of common sense will 
deny. A case was reported where a little child lay 
upon its mother's lap, and one drop fell from a pipe 
to the child's lip and it went into convulsions and into 
death. But you say, "Haven't people lived on in 
complete use of it to old age?" Oh, yes; just as I 
have seen inebriates seventy years old. In Boston, 
years ago, there was a meeting in which there were 



486 



TOBACCO AND OPIUM. 



several centenarians, and they were giving their 
experience, and one centenarian said that he had lived 
over a hundred years, and that he ascribed it to the 
fact that he had refrained from the use of intoxicating 
liquors. Right after him another centenarian said 
he had lived over a hundred years, and ascribed it 
to the fact that for the last fifty years he had hardly 
seen a sober moment. It is an amazing thing how 
many outrages men may commit upon their physical 
system, and yet live on. In the case of the man of 
the jug, he lived on because his body was pickled. 
In the case of the man of the pipe, he , lived on 
because his body turned into smoked liver. 

But are there no truths to be uttered in regard to 
this great evil ? What is the advice to be given to 
the multitude of young people ? What is the advice 
you are going to give to your children ? 

First of all, we must advise them to abstain from 
the use of tobacco, because all the medical fraternity 
of the United States and Great Britain agree in 
ascribing to this habit terrific unhealth. The men 
whose lifetime work is the study of the science of 
health say so, and shall I set up my opinion against 
theirs? Dr. Agnew, Dr. Olcott, Dr. Barnes, Dr. 
Rush, Dr. Mott, Dr. Harvey, Dr. Hosack— all the 
doctors, allopathic, homoeopathic, hydropathic, eclec- 
tic, denounce the habit as a matter of unhealth. A 
distinguished physician declared he considered the 
use of tobacco caused seventy different styles of dis- 
ease, and he says: " Of all the cases of cancer in the 
mouth that have come under my observation, almost 
in every case it has been ascribed to tobacco." 

The united testimony of all physicians is, that it 
depresses the nervous system, that it takes away 



TOBACCO AND OPIUM. 



487. 



twenty-five per cent, of the physical vigor of this gen- 
eration, and that it goes on as the years multiply, and, 
damaging this generation with accumulated curse, it 
strikes other centuries. And if it is so deleterious to 
the body, how much more destructive to the mind. 
An eminent physician, who was the superintendent of 
the insane asylum at Northampton, Mass., says: 
" Fully one-half of the patients we get in our asylum 
have lost their intellect through the use of tobacco." 
If it is such a bad thing to injure the body, what a 
bad thing, what a worse thing it is to injure the mind, 
and any man of common sense knows that tobacco 
attacks the nervous system, and everybody knows 
that the nervous system attacks the mind. 

Beside that, all reformers will tell you that the use 
of tobacco creates an unnatural thirst, and it is the 
cause of drunkenness in America to-day more than 
anything else. In all cases where you find men tak- 
ing strong drink, you find they use tobacco. There 
are men who use tobacco who do not take strong 
drink, but all who use strong drink use tobacco, and 
that shows beyond controversy there is an affinity be- 
tween the two products. There are reformers here 
to-day who will testify to you it is impossible for a 
man to reform from taking strong drink until he quits 
tobacco. In many of the cases where men have been 
reformed from strong drink, and have gone back to 
their cups, they have testified that they first touched 
tobacco, and then they surrendered to intoxicants. 

The pathway to the drunkard's grave and the 
drunkard's hell is strewn thick with tobacco leaves. 
What has been the testimony on this subject ? Is this 
a mere statement of a preacher, whose business it is 
to talk morals, or is the testimony of the world just as 



488 



TOBACCO AND OPIUM. 



emphatic? What did Benjamin Franklin say? "I 
never saw a well man, in the exercise of common 
sense, who would say that tobacco did him any 
good." What did Thomas Jefferson say ? Certainly 
he is good authority. He says in regard to the cul- 
ture of tobacco, "It is a culture productive of infinite 
wretchedness." What did Horace Greeley say of it? 
" It is a profiane stench." What did Daniel Webster 
say of it? " If those men must smoke, let them take 
the horse-shed !" One reason why the habit goes on 
from destruction to destruction, is that so many min- 
isters of the gospel take it. They smoke themselves 
into bronchitis, and then the dear people have to send 
them to Europe to get them restored from exhausting 
religious services ! They smoke until the nervous 
system is shattered. They smoke themselves to 
death. I could mention the names of five distin- 
guished clergymen who died of cancer in the mouth, 
and the doctor said, in every case, it was the result 
of tobacco. The tombstone of many a minister of 
religion has been covered all over with handsome 
eulogy, when if the true epitaph had been written it 
would have said : " Here lies a man killed by too 
much Cavendish?" They smoke until the world is 
blue, and their theology is blue, and everything is 
blue. How can a man stand in the pulpit and preach 
on the subject of temperance when he is indulging 
such a habit as that ? I have seen a cuspidor in a 
pulpit into which the holy man dropped his cud 
before he got up to read about "Blessed are the pure 
in heart," ancj to read about the rolling of sin as a 
sweet morsel under the tongue, and to read about 
the unclean animals in Leviticus that chewed the 
cud. 



TOBACCO AND OPIUM. 489 

About sixty-five years ago a student at Andover 
Theological Seminary graduated into the ministry. 
He had an eloquence and a magnetism which sent 
him to the front. Nothing could stand before him. 
But in a few months he was put in an insane asylum, 
and the physician said tobacco was the cause of the 
disaster. It was the custom in those days to give a 
portion of tobacco to every patient in the asylum. 
Nearly twenty years passed along, and that man was 
walking the floor of his cell in the asylum, when his 
reason returned, and he saw the situation, and he 
took the tobacco from his mouth and threw it 
against the iron gate of the place in which he was 
confined, and he said: " What brought me here? 
What keeps me here ? Tobacco ! tobacco ! God 
forgive me, God help me, and I will never use it 
again." He was fully restored to reason, came forth, 
preached the Gospel of Christ for some ten years, 
and then went into everlasting blessedness. 

There are ministers of religion now in this country 
who are dying by inches and they do not know what 
is the matter with them. They are being killed 
by tobacco. They are despoiling their influence 
through tobacco. They are malodorous with tobacco. 
I could give one paragraph of history, and that 
would be my own experience. It took ten cigars to 
make one sermon, and I got very nervous, and I 
awakened one day to see what an outrage I was com- 
mitting upon my health by the use of tobacco. I 
was about to change settlement, and a generous 
tobacconist of Philadelphia told me if I would come 
to Philadelphia and be his pastor he would give me 
all the cigars I wanted for nothing, all the rest of my 
life. I halted. I said to myself, " If I smoke more 



TOBACCO AND OPIUM. 



than I ought to now in these war times, and when 
my salary is small, what would I do if I had gratui- 
tous and unlimited supply ?■" Then and there, twenty- 
four years ago, I quit once and forever. It made a 
new man of me. Much of the time the world looked 
blue before that because I was looking through 
tobacco smoke. Ever since the world has been full 
of sunshine, and though I have done as much work 
as any one of my age, God has blessed me, it seems 
to me, with the best health a man ever had. 

I say that no minister of religion can afford to 
smoke. Put in my hand all the money expended by 
Christian men in Brooklyn for tobacco, and I will 
support three orphan asylums as well and as grandly 
as the three great orphan asylums already established. 
Put into my hand the money spent by Christians of 
America for tobacco, and I will clothe, shelter and 
feed all the suffering poor of the continent. The 
American church gives a million dollars a year for 
the salvation of the heathen, and American Christians 
smoke five million dollars' worth of tobacco. 

I stand here to-day in the presence of a vast multi- 
tude of young people who are forming their habits. 
Between seventeen and twenty-five years of age a 
great many young men get on them habits in the use 
of tobacco that they never get over. Let me say to 
all my young friends : 

You cannot afford to smoke ; you cannot afford to 
chew. You either take very good tobacco, or you 
take very cheap tobacco. If it is cheap I will tell you 
why it is cheap. It is made of burdock and lamp- 
black and sawdust and colt's foot and plantain leaves 
and fuller's earth and salt and alum and lime and a 
little tobacco, and you cannot afford to put such a 



TOBACCO AND OPIUM. 



491 



mess as that in your mouth. But if you use expensive 
tobacco, do you not think it would be better for you to 
take that amount of money which you are now ex- 
pending for this herb, and which you will expend 
during the course of your life if you keep the habit 
up, and with it buy a splendid farm, and make the 
afternoon and the evening of your life comfortable ? 

There are young men whose life is going out inch 
by inch from cigarettes. Now, do you not think it 
would be well to listen to the testimony of a mer- 
chant of New York, who said this : " In early life I 
smoked six cigars a day at six and a half cents each. 
They averaged that. I thought to myself one day, 
I'll just put aside all I consume in cigars and all I 
would consume if I keep on in the habit, and I'll see 
what it will come to by compound interest." And 
he gives this tremendous statistic : " Last July com- 
pleted thirty-nine years since, by the grace of God, 
I was emancipated from the filthy habit, and the 
saving amounted to the enormous sum of $29,102.03 
by compound interest. We lived in the city, but the 
children, who had learned something of the enjoy- 
ment of country life from their annual visits to their 
grandparent, longed for a home among the green 
fields. I found a very pleasant place in the country 
for sale. The cigar money came into requisition, and 
I found it amounted to a sufficient sum to purchase 
the place, and it is mine. Now, boys, you take your 
choice. Smoking without a home, or a home with- 
out smoking " This is common sense as well as 
religion. 

I must say a word to my friends who smoke the 
best tobacco, and who could stop at any time. What 
is your Christian influence in this respect ? What is 



492 



TOBACCO AND OPIUM. 



your influence upon young men ? Do you not think 
it would be better for you to exercise a little self- 
denial ? People wondered why George Briggs, Gov- 
ernor of Massachusetts, wore a cravat but no collar. 
" Oh," they said, it is an absurd eccentricity." 

This was the history of the cravat without any 
collar : For many years before he had been talking 
with an inebriate, trying to persuade him to give up 
the habit of drinking, and he said to the inebriate, 
"Your habit is entirely unnecessary." "Ah!" re- 
plied the inebriate, " we do a great many things that 
are unnecessary. It isn't necessary that you should 
have that collar." " Well," said Mr. Briggs, " I'll 
never wear a collar again if you will stop drinking." 
"Agreed," said the other. They joined hands in a 
pledge that they kept for twenty years — kept until 
death. That is magnificent. That is Gospel, prac- 
tical Gospel, worthy of George Briggs, worthy of 
you. Self-denial for others. Subtraction from our 
advantage that there may be an addition to some- 
body else's advantage. 

But what I have said has been chiefly appropriate 
for men. Now my subject widens, and shall be ap- 
propriate for both sexes. In all ages of the world 
there has been a search for some herb or flower that 
would stimulate lethargy and compose grief. Among 
the ancient Greeks and Egyptians they found some- 
thing they called nepenthe, and the Theban women 
knew how to compound it. If a person should chew 
a few of these leaves their grief would be imme- 
diately whelmed with hilarity. Nepenthe passed out 
from the consideration of the world, and then came 
hasheesh, which is from the Indian hemp. It is man- 
ufactured from the flowers at the top. The workman 



TOBACCO AND OPIUM. 



493 



with leathern apparel walks through the field, and 
the exudation of the plants adheres to the leathern 
garments, and then the man comes out, and scrapes 
off this exudation, and it is mixed with aromatics, 
and becomes an intoxicant that has brutalized whole 
nations. Its first effect is sight, spectacle glorious 
and grand beyond all description, but afterward it 
pulls down body, mind, and soul, into anguish. 

I knew one of the most brilliant men of our time. 
His appearance in a newspaper column, or a book, or 
a magazine, was an enchantment. In the course of a 
half hour he could produce more wit and more valu- 
able information than any man I ever heard talk. 
But he chewed hasheesh. He first took it out of cu- 
riosity to see whether the power said to be attached 
really existed. He took it. He got under the power 
of it. He tried to break loose. He put his hand in 
the cocatrice's den to see whether it would bite, and 
he found out to his own undoing. His friends 
gathered around and tried to save him, but he could 
not be saved. The father, a minister of the Gospel, 
prayed with him and counseled him, and out of a 
comparatively small salary employed the first medical 
advice of New York, Philadelphia, Edinburgh, Paris, 
London, and Berlin, for he was his only son. No 
help came. First his body gave way in pangs and 
convulsions of suffering. Then his mind gave way, 
and he became a raving maniac. Then his soul went 
out, blaspheming God, into a starless eternity. He 
died at thirty years of age. Behold the work of ac- 
cursed hasheeh. 

But I must put my emphasis upon the use of opium. 
It is made from the white poppy. It is not a new 
discovery. Three hundred years before Christ we 



4 



494 TOBACCO AND OPIUM. 

read of it, but it was not until the seventh century 
that it took up its march of death, and passing out of 
the curative and the medicinal, through smoking and 
mastication, it has become the curse of nations. In 
1861 there were imported into this country one hun- 
dred and seven thousand pounds of opium. In 1880, 
nineteen years after, there were imported five hun- 
dred and thirty thousand pounds of opium. In 1876 
there were in this country two hundred and twenty- 
five thousand opium consumers. Now it is estimated 
that there are in the United States to-day six hun- 
dred thousand victims of opium. It is appalling. 

We do not know why some families do not get on. 
There is something mysterious about them. The 
opium habit is so stealthy, it is so deceitful, and it is 
so deathful you can cure a hundred men of strong 
drink where you can cure one opium-eater. 

I have knelt down in this very church by those who 
were elegant in apparel, and elegant in appearance, 
and from the depths of my soul we cried out for 
God's rescue. Somehow it did not come. In many 
a household only a physician and pastor know it — 
the physician called in for physical relief, the pastor 
called in for spiritual relief, and they both fail. The 
physician confesses his defeat, the minister of religion 
confesses his defeat, for somehow God does not seem 
to hear a prayer offered for an opium-eater. His 
grace is infinite, and I have been told there are cases 
of reformation. I never saw one. I say this not to 
wound the feelings of any who may feel this awful 
grip, but to utter a potent warning that you stand 
back from that gate of hell. Oh, man, oh, woman, 
tampering with this great evil, have you fallen back 
on this as a permanent resource, because of some 



TOBACCO AND OPIUM. 



49$ 



physical distress or mental anguish? Better stop. 
The ecstacies do not pay for the horrors. The Para- 
dise is followed too soon by the Pandemonium. Mor- 
phia, a blessing of God for the relief of sudden pain 
and of acute dementia, misappropriated and never 
intended for permanent use. 

It is not merely the barbaric fanatics that are taken 
down by it. Did you ever read De Quincey's Con- 
fessions of an Opium-eater? He says that during the 
first ten years the habit handed to him all the keys 
of Paradise, but it would take something as mighty 
as De Quincey's pen to describe the consequent hor- 
rors. There is nothing that I have ever read about 
the tortures of the damned that seemed more horrible 
than those which De Quincey says he suffered. Sam- 
uel Taylor Coleridge first conquered the world with 
his exquisite pen, and then was conquered by opium. 
The most brilliant, the most eloquent lawyer of the 
nineteenth century went down under its power, and 
there is a vast multitude of men and women — but 
more women than men — who are going into the dun- 
geon of that awful incarceration. 

The worst thing about it is, it takes advantage of 
one's weakness. De Quincey says : " I got to be an 
opium-eater on account of my rheumatism." Cole- 
ridge says ; " I got to be an opium-eater on account 
of my sleeplessness." For what are you taking it? 
For God's sake do not take it long. The wealthiest, 
the grandest families going down under its power.. 
Twenty-five thousand victims of opium in Chicago. 
Twenty-five thousand victims of opium in St. Louis,, 
and, according to that average, seventy-five thousand 
victims of opium in New York and Brooklyn. 

The clerk of a drugstore says : " I can tell them 



496 TOBACCO AND OPIUM. 

when they come in ; there is something about their 
complexion, something about their manner, some- 
thing about the look of their eyes, that shows they 
are victims." Some in the struggle to get away 
from it try chloral. Whole tons of chloral manu- 
factured in Germany every year. Baron Liebig says 
he knows one chemist in Germany who manufactures 
a half ton of chloral every week. Beware of hydrate 
of chloral ! It is coming on with mighty tread to 
curse these cities. But I am chiefly under this 
head speaking of morphine. The devil of morphia 
is going to be in this country, in my opinion, mightier 
than the devil of alcohol. 

By the power of the Christian pulpit, by the power 
of the Christianized printing-press, by the power of 
the Lord God Almighty, all these evils are going to 
be extirpated — all, all, and you have a work in re- 
gard to that, and I have a work. But what we do 
we had better do right away. The clock ticks now ; 
and we hear it ; after awhile the clock will tick and 
we will not hear it. 



CHAPTER L. 



SOCIAL DISSIPATION. 

I am not to discuss .the old question, Is dancing 
right or wrong? but I am to discuss the question, 
Does dancing take too much place and occupy too 
much time in modern society ? and in my remarks 
I hope to carry with me the earnest conviction of all 
thoughtful persons, and I believe I will. 

You will all admit, whatever you think of that 
style of amusement and exercise, that from many 
circles it has crowded out all intelligent conversation. 
You will also admit that it has made the condition 
of those who do not dance, either because they do 
not know how, or because they have not the health 
to endure it, or because through conscientious 
scruples they must decline the exercise, very uncom- 
fortable. You will also admit, all of you, that it has 
passed in many cases from an amusement to a dissi- 
pation, and you are easily able to understand the 
bewilderment of the educated Chinaman who, stand- 
ing in the brilliant circle where there was dancing 
going on four or five hours, and the guests seemed 
exhausted, turned to the proprietor of the house and 
said : " Why don't you allow your servants to do 
this for you ?" 

You are also willing to admit, whatever be your 
idea in regard to the amusement I am speaking of, 
and whatever be your idea of the old-fashioned 

497 32 



49 8 SOCIAL DISSIPATION. 

square dance, and of many of the processional romps 
in which I can see no evil, the round dance is admin- 
istrative of evil, and ought to be driven out of all 
respectable circles. I am by natural temperament 
and religious theory opposed to the position taken by 
all those who are horrified at playfulness on the part 
of the young, and who think that all questions are 
decided — questions of decency and morals — by the 
position of the feet, while on the other hand, I can see 
nothing but ruin, temporal and eternal, for those who 
go into the dissipations of social life, dissipations 
which have already despoiled thousands of young 
men and young women of all that is noble in char- 
acter, and useful in life. 

Dancing is the graceful motion of the body ad- 
justed by art to the sound and measures of musical 
• instrument or of the human voice. All nations have 
danced. The ancients thought that Castor and Pol- 
lux taught the art to the Lacedaemonians. But who- 
ever started it, all climes have adopted it. In ancient 
times they had the festal dance, the military dance, 
the mediatorial dance, the bacchanalian dance, and 
queens and lords swayed to and fro in the gardens, 
and the rough backwoodsman with this exercise 
awakened the echo of the forest. There is some- 
thing in the sound of lively music to evoke the 
movement of the hand and foot, whether cultured or 
uncultured. Passing down the street, we uncon- 
sciously keep step to the sound of the brass band, 
while the Christian in church with his foot beats time 
while his soul rises upon some great harmony. While 
this is so in civilized lands, the red men of the forest 
have their scalp dances, their green-corn dances, their 
war dances. 



SOCIAL DISSIPATION. 



499 



In ancient times the exercise was so utterly and 
completely depraved that the Church anathematized 
it. The old Christian fathers expressed themselves 
most vehemently against it. St. Chrysostom says: 
" The feet were not given for dancing, but to walk 
modestly, not to leap impudently like camels." One 
of the dogmas of the ancient Church reads: "A 
dance is the devil's possession, and he that entereth 
into a dance entereth into his possession. As many 
paces as a man makes in dancing, so many paces does 
he make to hell." Elsewhere the old dogmas declared 
this ''The woman that singeth in the dance is the 
princess of the devil, and those that answer are her 
clerks, and the beholders are his friends, and the 
music are his bellows, and the fiddlers are the min- 
isters of the devil. For, as when hogs are strayed, 
if the hogsherd call one, all assemble together, so 
Avhen the devil calleth one woman to sing in the 
dance, or to play on some musical instrument, pres- 
ently all the dancers gather together." This indis- 
criminate and universal denunciation of the exercise 
came from the fact that it was utterly and completely 
depraved. 

But we are not to discuss the customs of the olden 
times, but customs now. We are not to take the evi- 
dence of the ancient fathers, but our own conscience, 
enlightened by the Word of God, is to be the stan- 
dard. Oh, bring no harsh criticism upon the young. 
I would not drive out from their soul all the hilarities 
of life. I do not believe that the inhabitants of ancient 
Wales, when they stepped to the sound of the rustic 
harp, went down to ruin. I believe God intended the 
young people to laugh and romp and play. I do not 
believe God would have put exuberance in the soul 



5oo 



SOCIAL DISSIPATION. 



and exuberance in the body if He had not intended 
they should in some wise exercise it and demonstrate 
it. If a mother joins hands with her children and 
cross the floor to the sound of music, I see no harm. 
If a group of friends cross and recross the room to 
the sound of piano well played, I see no harm. If a 
company, all of whom are known to host and hostess 
as reputable, cross and recross the room to the sound 
of musical instrument, I see no harm. I tried for a 
long while to see harm in it. I could not see any 
harm in it. I never shall see any harm in that. Our 
men need to be kept young, young for many years 
longer than they are kept young. Never since my 
boyhood days have I had more sympathy with the 
innocent hilarities of life than I have now. What 
though we have felt heavy burdens ! What though 
we have had to endure hard knocks! Is that any 
reason why we should stand in the way of those who, 
unstung of life's misfortunes, are full of exhilaration, 
and full of glee ? 

God bless the young ! They will have to wait 
many a long year before they hear me say anything 
that would depress their ardor or clip their wings, or 
make them believe that life is hard and cold and 
repulsive. It is not. I tell them, judging from my 
own experience, that they will be treated a great deal 
better than they deserve. We have no right to 
grudge the innocent hilarities to the young. 

As we go on in years let us remember that we had 
our gleeful times ; let us be able to say, " We had 
our good times, let others have their good times." 
Let us willingly resign our place to those who are 
coming after us. I will cheerfully give them every- 
thing — my house, my books, my position in society, 



SOCIAL DISSIPATION. 50I 

my heritage. After twenty, forty, fifty years we 
have been drinking out of the cup of this life, do not 
let us begrudge the passing of it that others may 
take a drink. But while all this is so, we can have 
no sympathy with sinful indulgences, and I am going 
to speak in regard to some of them, though I should 
tread on the long trail of some popular vanities. 
What are the dissipations of social life to-day, and 
what are the dissipations of the ballroom ? In some 
cities and in some places reaching all the year round, 
in other places only in the summer time and at the 
watering-places. There are dissipations of social life 
that are cutting a very wide swathe with the sickle 
of death, and hundreds and thousands are going 
down under these influences, and my subject in 
application is as wide as the continent, and as wide as 
Christendom. The whirlpool of social dissipation is 
drawing down some of the brightest craft that ever 
sailed the sea — thousands and tens of thousands of 
the bodies and souls annually consumed in the con- 
flagration of ribbons. 

Social dissipation is the abettor of pride, it is the 
instigator of jealousy, it is the sacrificial altar of 
health, it is the defiler of the soul, it is the avenue of 
lust, and it is the curse of every town in America. 
Social dissipation. It may be hard to draw the line 
and say that this is right on the one side, and that is 
wrong on the other side. It is not necessary that 
we do that, for God has put a throne in every man's 
soul, and I appeal to that throne to-day. When a 
man does wrong he knows he does wrong, and when 
he does right he knows he does right, and to that 
throne that Almighty God lifted in the heart of 
every man and woman, I appeal. 



502 SOCIAL DISSIPATION. 

As to the physical ruin wrought by the dissipa- 
tions of social life, there can be no doubt. What 
may we expect of people who work all day and 
dance all night? After awhile they will be thrown 
on society, nervous, exhausted imbeciles. These 
people who indulge in the suppers and the midnight 
revels and then go home in the cold unwrapped in 
limbs, will after awhile be found to have been written 
down in God's eternal records as suicides, as much 
suicides as if they had taken their life with a pistol, 
or a knife, or strychnine. 

How many people in America have stepped from 
the ballroom into the graveyard ! Consumptions 
and swift neuralgias are close on their track. Amid 
many of the glittering scenes of social life in America, 
diseases stand right and left, and balance and chain. 
The breath of the sepulchre floats up through the 
perfume, and the froth of Death's lip bubbles up in 
the champagne. I am told that in some parts of this 
country, in some of the cities, there are parents who 
have actually given up housekeeping and gone to 
boarding, that they may give their time inimitably to 
social dissipations. I have known such cases. I have 
known family after family blasted in that way, in 
one of the other cities where I preached. Father 
and mother turning their back upon all quiet culture 
and all the amenities of home, leading forth their 
entire family in the wrong direction. Annihilated, 
worse than annihilated — for there are some things 
worse than annihilation. I give you the history of 
more than one family in America, when I say they 
went on in the dissipations of social life until the 
father dropped into a lower style of dissipation, and 
after awhile the son was tossed out into society a 



SOCIAL DISSIPATION. 503 

1 

nonentity, and after awhile the daughter eloped with 
a French dancing-master, and after awhile the mother, 
getting on further and further in years, tries to hide 
the wrinkles, but fails in the attempt, trying all the 
arts of the belle, an old flirt, a poor, miserable butter- 
fly without any wings. 

Let me tell you that the dissipations of American 
life, of social life in America, are despoiling the use- 
fulness of a vast multitude of people. What do those 
people care about the fact that there are whole 
nations in sorrow and suffering and agony, when they 
have for consideration the more important question 
about the size of a glove, or the tie of a cravat? 
Which one of them ever bound up the wounds of 
the hospital? Which one of them ever went out to 
care for the poor? Which of them do you find in 
the haunts of sin, distributing tracts ? They live on 
themselves, and it is very poor pasture. 

Oh ! what a belittling process to the human mind 
this everlasting question about dress, this discussion 
of fashionable infinitesimals, this group looking ask- 
ance at the glass, wondering, with an infinity of 
earnestness, how that last geranium leaf does look — 
this shriveling of a man's moral dignity until it is not 
observable to the naked eye, this Spanish inquisition 
of a tight shoe, this binding up of an immortal soul in 
a ruffle, this pitching off of an immortal nature over 
the rocks, when God intended it for great and ever- 
lasting uplifting. 

You know as well as I do that the dissipations of 
social life in America to-day are destroying thou- 
sands and tens of thousands of people, and it is time 
that the pulpits lift their voice against them, for I 
now prophecy the eternal misfortune of all those who 



504 



SOCIAL DISSIPATION. 



enter the rivalry. When did the white, glistening- 
boards of a dissipated ballroom ever become the 
road to heaven? When was a torch for eternity 
ever lighted at the chandelier of a dissipated scene ? 
From a table spread after such an excited and dese- 
crated scene who ever went home to pray ? 

In my parish of Philadelphia there was a young 
woman brilliant as a spring morning. She gave her 
life to the world. She would come to religious 
meetings and under conviction would for a little 
while begin to pray, and then would rush off again 
into the discipleship of the world. She had all the 
world could offer of brilliant social position. One 
day a flushed and excited messenger asked me to 
hasten to her house, for she was dying. I entered 
the room. There were the physicians, there was the 
mother, there lay this disciple of the world. T asked 
her some questions in regard to the soul. She made 
no answer. I knelt down to pray. I rose again, and 
desiring to get some expression in regard to her 
eternal interests, I said: " Have you any hope?" 
and then for the first her lips mewed in a whisper as 
she said : " No hope ! " Then she died. The world, 
she served it, and the world helped her not in the 
last. 

I would wish that I could marshal all the young 
people in this audience to an appreciation of the fact 
that you have an earnest work in life, and your 
amusements and recreations are only to help you 
along in that work. At the time of a religious 
awakening, a Christian young woman spoke to a 
man in regard to his soul's salvation. He floated out 
into the world. After awhile she became worldly in 
her Christian profession. The man said one day, 



SOCIAL DISSIPATION. 505 

" Well, I am as safe as she is. I was a Christian, she 
said she was a Christian. She talked with me about 
my soul ; if she is safe I am safe." Then a sudden acci- 
dent took him off, without an opportunity to utter 
one word of prayer. 

Do you not realize, have you not noticed, young 
men and old — have you not noticed that the dissi- 
pations of social life are blasting and destroying a 
vast multitude ? 



CHAPTER LI. 

SPIRITUALISM AN IMPOSTURE. 

We are surrounded by mystery. Before us, behind 
us, to the right of us, to the left of us, mystery. 
There is a vast realm unexplored, that science, I have 
no doubt, will yet map out. He who explores that 
realm will do the world more service than did ever 
a Columbus or an Amerigo Vespucci. There are so 
many things that can not be accounted for, so many 
sounds and appearances which defy acoustics and in- 
vestigation, so many things approximating to the 
spectral, so many effects which do not seem to have a 
sufficient cause. The wall between the spiritual and 
the material is a very thin wall. 

That there are communications between this world 
and the next world there can be no doubt, the spirits 
of our departed going from this world to that, and, 
according to the Bible, ministering spirits coming 
from that to this. I do not know but that some time 
there may be complete, and constant, and unmistak- 
able lines of communication opened between this 
world and the next. 

To unlatch the door between the present state and 
the future state all the fingers of superstition have 
been busy. We have books entitled " Footfalls on 
the Boundaries of Other Worlds,'' " The Debatable 
Land Between this World and the Next," " Re- 
searches into the Phenomena of Spiritualism," and 

506 



SPIRITUALISM AN IMPOSTURE. 



507 



whole libraries of hocus-pocus, enough to deceive 
the very elect. 

Modern Spiritualism proposes to open the door 
between this world and the next, and put us into 
communication with the dead. It has never yet 
offered one reasonable credential. There is nothing 
in the intelligence or the character of the founders of 
Spiritualism to commend it. All the wonderful 
things performed by Spiritualism have been per- 
formed by sleight-of-hand and rank deception. Dr. 
Carpenter, Robert Houdin, Mr. Waite and others 
have exposed the fraud by dramatizing in the pres- 
ence of audiences the very things that Spiritualism 
proposes to do or says it has done. In the New 
York Independent there was an account of a challenge 
given by a non-Spiritualist to a Spiritualist to meet 
him on the platform of Tremont Temple, Boston. 
The non-Spiritualist declared that he would by 
sleight-of-hand perform all the feats executed by the 
Spiritualist. They met in the presence of an audience. 
The Spiritualist went through his wonderful per- 
formances, and the other man by sleight-of-hand did 
the same things. 

" By their fruits ye shall know them," is the test 
that Christ gave, and by that test I conclude that the 
tree of Spiritualism which yields bad fruit, and bad 
fruit continually, is one of the worst trees in all the 
orchard of necromancy. The postofhce which it has 
established between the next world and this is an- 
other Star Route postomce, kept up at vast expense 
without ever having delivered one letter from the 
other world to this. 

The first leading remark I have to make in regard 
to Spiritualism is that it is a very old doctrine. 



508 SPIRITUALISM AN IMPOSTURE. 

Do you want to know the origin and the history 
of that which has captured so many in all our towns 
and cities, a doctrine with which some of you are 
tinged? Spiritualism in America was born in 1847. 
in Hydesville, Wayne county, New York, where one 
night there was a rapping at the door of Michael 
Weekman, and a second rapping at the door, and a 
third rapping at the door, and every time the door 
was opened there was no one there. Proof positive 
that they were invisible knuckles that rapped at the 
door. In that same house there was a man who felt 
a cold hand pass over his forehead, and there was no, 
arm attached to the hand. Proof positive it was 
spiritualistic influence. 

After a while, Mr. Fox with his family moved into 
that house, and then they had hangings at the door 
every night. One night Mr. Fox cried out : " Are 
you a spirit?" Two raps — answer in the affirmative. 
" Are you an injured spirit?" Two raps — answer in 
the affirmative. Then they knew right away that it 
was the spirit of a peddler who had been murdered 
in that house years before, and who had been robbed 
of his $500. Whether the spirit of the peddler came 
back to collect his $500 or his bones I do not know. 
But from that time on there was a constant excite- 
ment around the premises, and the excitement spread 
all over the land. All these are matters of history. 
People said : " Well, now, we have a new religion." 
Ah ! it is not a new religion. 

In all ages there have been necromancers, those 
who consulted with the spirits of the departed — 
charmers who threw people into a mesmeric state, 
sorcerers who by eating poisonous herbs can see 
everything, hear everything, and tell everything, 



SPIRITUALISM AN IMPOSTURE. 509 

astrologers who found out a new dispensation of the 
stars, experts in palmistry who can tell by the lines 
in the palm of your hand your origin, your history 
and your destiny. From the cavern on Mount 
Parnassus it is said there came up an atmosphere 
that intoxicated the sheep and the goats that came 
near by, and under its influence the shepherds were 
lifted into exaltation so they could foretell future ■ 
events and consult with familiar spirits. Long before 
the time of Christ the Brahmins had all the table 
rocking and the table quaking. 

You want to know what God thinks of all these 
things. He says in one place, " I will be a swift wit- 
ness against the sorcerers." He says in another 
place, " Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." And 
lest you should make too wide a margin between 
Spiritualism and witchcraft, he groups them to- 
gether, and says : " There shall not be found 
among you any consulter with familiar spirits, or a 
wizard, or a necromancer, for all that do these things 
are an abomination unto the Lord." And then the 
still more remarkable passage, which says : " The 
soul that turneth after such as have familiar spirits, 
and after wizards, to go a whoring after them, I will 
even set my face against that soul, and will cut him 
off from among his people ; " and a score of passages 
showing that God never speaks of these evils in any 
other way than w ith living thunders of indignation. 
After all that, be a Spiritualist if you dare ! 

Another remark I have to make in regard to Spirit- 
ualism is, that it takes advantage of people when 
they are weak and morbid with trouble. We lose a 
friend. The house is dark, the world is dark, the 
future seems dark. If we had in our rebellion and in 



5IO SPIRITUALISM AN IMPOSTURE. 

our weakness the power to marshal a host and recap- 
ture our loved one from the next world, we would 
marshal the host. Oh, how we long to speak with 
the dead ! 

Spiritualism comes in at that moment, when we 
are all worn out, perhaps by six weeks' or two 
months' watching, all worn out body, mind, and soul, 
and says, " Now I will open the door, you shall hear 
the voices ; take your place around the table ; all be 
quiet now." Five minutes pass along ; no response 
from the next world. Ten minutes, fifteen minutes, 
twenty minutes. Nervous system all the time more 
and more, agitated. Thirty minutes; no response 
from the next world. Forty minutes pass, and the 
table begins to shiver. Then the medium sits down, 
his hand twitching, and the pen and the ink and the 
paper having been provided, he writes out the mes- 
sage from the next world. 

What is remarkable is that these spirits, after being 
in the illumination of heaven, some of them for years, 
forget how to spell right. People who were excel- 
lent grammarians come back, and with their first 
sentence smash all the laws of English grammar ! I 
received such a letter. I happened to know the man 
that signed it. It was a miserably spelled letter. I 
sent it back with the remark : " You just send word 
to those spirits they had better go to school and 
study orthography." It comes in time of weakness, 
and overthrows the soul. Now, just think of spirits 
enthroned in heaven coming down to crawl under a 
table, and break crockery, and ring the bell before 
supper is ready, and rattle the shutters on a gusty 
nigfht. What consolation in such miserable stuff as 
compared with the consolation of our departed 



SPIRITUALISM AN IMPOSTURE. 5 1 1 

friends free from toil, and sin, and pain are forever 
happy, and that we will join them, not in mysterious 
and half utterances, which make the hair stand on 
end, and make cold chills creep up and down the 
back, but in a reunion most blessed, and happy, and 
glorious. 

" And none shall murmur or misdoubt 
When God's great sunrise finds us out!" 

Oh, I hate Spiritualism, because it takes advantage 
of people when they are weak, and worn out, and 
morbid under the bereavements and sorrows of this 
life. 

Another remark I have to make in regard to Spir- 
itualism is, that it is an affair of the night. 

The Davenports, the Foxes, the Fowlers, and all 
the mediums prefer the night, or, if it is in the day- 
time, a darkened room. Why ? Because deception 
is more successful in the night. Some of the things 
done in Spiritualism are not frauds, but are to be 
ascribed to some* occult law of nature which will 
after a while be demonstrated ; but nine hundred and 
ninety-nine out of a thousand of their feats are arrant 
and unmitigated humbug. 

I suppose almost every one sometimes has been 
touched by some hallucination. Indigestion from a 
late supper generally accounts for it. If you will 
only take in generous proportions at eleven o'clock 
at night, lobster salad and mince pie and ice-cream 
and lemonade and a little cocoanut, you will be able 
to see fifty materialized spirits. All the mediums of 
the past did their work in the night. Witch of Endor 
held her seance in the night. Deeds of darkness. 
Away with this religion of spooks ! 

Another remark I have to make in regard to Spir- 



512 SPIRITUALISM AN IMPOSTURE. 

itualism is that it ruins the physical health. Look in 
upon an audience of Spiritualists. Cadaverous, pale, 
worn out, exhausted. Hands cold and clammy. 
Nothing prospers but long hair— soft marshes yield- 
ing rank grass. Something startling going through 
that room, clothed in white. Table fidgety as 
though to get its feet loose and dance. Voices 
sepulchral. Rappings mysterious. I never knew a 
confirmed Spiritualist who had a healthy nervous 
organization. It is the first stages of epilepsy or 
catalepsy. I have noticed that people who hear a 
great many rappings from the next world have not 
much strength to endure the hard raps of this. 

What a sin it is for you, my brother, to be trifling 
with your nervous system. Get your nervous system 
out of tune and the whole universe is out of tune as 
far as you are concerned. Better tamper with the 
chemist's retort that may smite you dead, or with the 
engineer's steam boiler that may blow you to atoms, 
than trifle with your nerves. You can live without 
eyes, and with one lung and with no hands and no 
feet. Be happy as men have been happy in such mis- 
fortune ; but alas ! if your nervous system is gone. 

Another remark I have to make in regard to 
Spiritualism is, that it is a marital and social curse. 
Deeds of darkness and orgies of obscenity have 
transpired under its wing. I cannot tell you the 
story. I will not pollute my tongue or your ears 
with the recital. Enough to know that the criminal 
courts have often been called to stop the criminality. 
How many families have been broken up here in 
Brooklyn and throughout the United States! Wo- 
men by the hundreds have by Spiritualism been 
pushed off into a life of profligacy. It employs all 



SPIRITUALISM AN IMPOSTURE. 



513 



that phraseology about " spiritual affinities," and 
" affinital relation," and " spiritual matches," and the 
whole vocabulary of free love. It is at war with 
the marriage relation. I read you from one of their 
prominent papers where it says : " Marriage is the 
monster curse of civilization." The Spiritualist 
paper goes on to say : " Marriage controls education, 
is the fountain of selfishness, the cause of intemper- 
ance and debauchery, the source and aggravation of 
poverty, the prolific mother of disease and crime. 
The society we want is men and women living in 
freedom, sustaining themselves by their own industry, 
dealing with each other in equity, respecting each 
other's sovereignty, and governed by their attrac- 
tions." 

If Spiritualism had full swing it would turn this 
world into a pandemonium of carnality. It is 1 an 
unclean and an adulterous religion, and the sooner it 
goes down to the pit from which it came up, the 
better for earth and heaven. For the sake of man's 
honor and woman's purity, let it perish. I wish I 
could gather up all the raps it has ever heard from 
spirits blest or damned on its own head in one 
thundering rap of annihilation. 

Another remark I have to make in regard to 
Spiritualism is, that it produces insanity. There is 
not an asylum from Bangor to San Francisco where 
there are not the torn and bleeding victims of Spirit- 
ualism. You go into an asylum and say : " What is 
the matter with this man?" The doctors will tell 
you again and again, " Spiritualism demented him." 
" What is the matter with this woman ? " The doc- 
tors will tell you : " Spiritualism demented her." 
They have been carried off into mental midnight — 

33 



514 



SPIRITUALISM AN IMPOSTURE. 



senators, judges of courts — and at one time they 
came near capturing a President of the United 
States. At Flushing, Long Island, there was a happy 
home. The father became infatuated with Spirit- 
ualism, forsook his home, took the $15,000, the only 
$15,000 he had, surrendered them to a New York 
medium, three times attempted to take his own life, 
and then was sent to the State lunatic asylum. You 
put your hand in the hand of this influence and it 
will lead you down to darkness, eternal darkness, 
where Spiritualism holds an everlasting seance. 

You remember the steamer Atlantic started from 
Europe for America. After it had been out long 
enough to get to the middle of the ocean, the ma- 
chinery broke, and for days and weeks the steamer 
Atlantic tossed about in the waves. Well, there were 
many friends of passengers in these cities and they 
said, " That vessel has gone down ; it is a month since 
she was due ; that vessel must have sunk." There 
were wives who went to spiritual mediums to learn 
the fate of that vessel. The spirits were gathered 
around the table and they said that vessel had gone 
to the bottom with all on board. Some of those 
women went to the insane asylum and passed the rest 
of their lives. But one day, off quarantine, a gun 
was heard. Flags went up on all the shipping, bells 
of New York and Brooklyn were rung, newsboys ran 
through the streets shouting : " Extra ! The Atlan- 
tic safe ! " The vessel came to wharf, and there was 
embracing of long-absent ones; but some of these 
men went up to the insane asylum to find their wives 
incarcerated by this foul cheat of hell, Spiritualism. 

What did Judge Edmonds say in Broadway Taber- 
nacle, New York, while making argument in behalf 



SPIRITUALISM AN IMPOSTURE. ' 5 1 5 

of Spiritualism, himself having been fully captured. 
What did Judge Edmonds say ? He admitted this: 
" There is a fascination about consultation with the 
spirits of the dead that has a tendency to lead people 
off from their right judgment, and to instil into them 
a fanaticism that is revolting to the natural mind." 

Spiritualism not only ruins its disciples but it ruins 
its mediums. 

No sooner had the Gadarean swine on the banks 
of Galilee become spiritual mediums than they went 
down in an avalanche of pork to the consternation of 
all the herdsmen. Spiritualism bad for a man, bad 
for a woman, bad for a beast. 

Another remark I have to make in regard to Spir- 
itualism is, that it ruins the soul. 

It first makes a man quarter of an infidel, then it 
makes him half an infidel, then it makes him a full 
infidel. The whole system is built on the insuffi- 
ciency of the Bible as a revelation. If God is ever 
struck square in the face it is when men sit at a table, 
put their hands on the table and practically say : 
" Come, you spirits of the departed, and make a rev- 
elation in regard to the future world which the Bible 
has not made. Come father, come mother, companion 
in life, my children, come, tell me something about 
that future world which the Bible is not able to tell 
me." Although the Bible says he that adds a word to 
it shall be found a liar, men are all the time getting 
these revelations, or trying to get them from the 
next world. You will either, my brother, my sister, 
you will either have to give up the Bible or give up 
Spiritualism. No one ever for a very great length 
of time kept both of them. 



CHAPTER LIL 

BOOKS. 

The printing-press is the mightiest agency for good 
or evil. A minister of the Gospel occupies an import- 
ant position, but not one so responsible as that of the 
editor and publisher. Take the one fact that from 
the daily press of New York there go forth four hun- 
dred and fifty thousand copies a day, and that three 
of the weeklies have an aggregate circulation of one 
million two hundred thousand, and then cipher, if you 
can, .how far up, and how far down, and how far out, 
reach the influences of the American printing-press. 

I have an idea that it is to be the chief agency for 
the rescue and evangelization of the world, and that 
the last great battle will not be fought with guns and 
swords, but with types and presses ; a gospelized 
printing-press triumphing over, and trampling under 
foot, and crushing out a pernicious literature. 

The greatest blessing that has come to this world 
since Jesus Christ came, is good journalism, and 
the worst scourge, unclean journalism. You must 
apply the same law to the book and the newspaper. 
The newspaper is a book swifter and in more portable 
shape. Under unclean literature, under pernicious 
books and newspapers, tens of thousands have gone 
down ; the bodies of the victims in the penitentiaries, 
in the dens of shame, and some of the souls in the 
asylums for the imbecile and the insane, more of the 

5i6 




BOOKS. 

I After C. Kiesel.l 



* 



BOOKS. 



519 



souls already having gone down in an avalanche of 
horror and despair. The London plague is nothing 
to it. That counted its victims by the thousands ; 
this modern pest shovels its millions into the charnel- 
house of the morally dead. The longest train of cars 
that ever rolled over the Erie track, or the Hudson, 
is not long enough, or large enough, to hold the 
beastliness and the putrefaction which has been gath- 
ered up in the bad books' and newspapers of America 
for the last twenty years. 

Now, there is no more absorbing question to-day 
for every man and every patriot than this question : 
Is there anything we can do to stem this awful tor- 
rent of pernicious literature ? Are we to make our 
minds the receptacle for all that bad people choose to 
write ? Are we to stoop down, and drink out of the 
trough which wickedness has filled ? Are we to mire 
in iniquity, or to chase will-o'-the-wisps across swamps 
of death, when God invites us into the blooming gar- 
dens of His love? Is there anything you can do? 
Yes. Is there anything that I can do to help stem 
this mighty torrent of pernicious literature ? Yes. 

The first thing for us all to do is to keep ourselves 
and our families aloof from iniquitous books and 
newspapers. Standing as we do, chin deep in ficti- 
tious literature, the question is every day asked : Is 
it right to. read novels? Well, I have to say that 
there are good novels, honest novels, Christian nov- 
els, useful novels, novels that make the heart purer 
and the life better. The world can never pay its debt 
of obligation to Hawthorne, and Landor, and Hunt, 
and Mackenzie, and scores of others who in times past 
have written healthful novels. The follies of the 
world were never better excoriated than in the books 



520 



BOOKS. 



of Miss Edgeworth. The memories of the past were 
never better embalmed than in the writings of 
Walter Scott. No healthier books have been writ- 
ten than those by Fenimore Cooper, his novels full 
of the breath of the seaweed and the air of the 
American forests. Kingsley did a grand work in his 
books in smiting morbidity and giving us the poetry 
of strong muscles and good health and fresh air. 
Thackeray accomplished a good work when he 
caricatured pretenders to gentility and high blood. 
The writings of Charles Dickens are an everlasting 
protest against injustice, and a plea for the poor. 

These books, read in the right time and read in 
the right proportion with other books, are healthful 
and beneficial. But I declare to you to-day that I 
believe three-fourths of the novels of the time are 
pernicious and baleful to the last extent. The whole 
land is flooded with the iniquity. Some of these bad 
novels come forth from respectable printing presses. 
Some of them are actually commended by religious 
journals. You find them in the desk of the school 
miss, you find them in the trunk of the young man 
on his journey, you find them in the steamboat cabin, 
you find them in the hotel reception room. Every- 
where, everywhere, a pernicious literature. You 
see a light late at night in your child's room, You 
go in and say : " What are you doing ?" Read- 
ing." " What are you reading ?" " A book." You 
take the book and look at it, and you find it is a per- 
nicious book. You say, " Where did you get it ?" 
" Borrowed it." Thousands of people buy perni- 
cious literature and are generous enough to let 
others also be blasted. 

Now, I gather to-day all the novels, good and bad ; ■ 



BOOKS. 



521 



all the histories, false and true ; all the romances, 
beautiful and hideous ; all the epilogues, commen- 
taries, catalogues ; family, city, state, national 
libraries, and I heave them into one great pyramid, 
and I bring to bear upon them some grand and 
glorious and infallible Christian principles, so that if 
you ask me to-day, Is there anything we can do to 
stem this tide? I say, Yes, very much, every way. 

First, we will stand aloof from all books that give 
false pictures of human life. Life is neither a trag- 
edy nor a farce. Men are not all either knaves or 
heroes. Women are neither angels nor furies. 
Judging, however, from much of the literature of 
this day, we would come to the idea that life is a 
fitful, fantastic, and extravagant thing, instead of a 
practical and useful thing. After these people have 
been reading late at night romances which glorify 
iniquity and present knavery in most attractive form, 
how poorly prepared are they for the work of life. 
That man who is an indiscriminate novel reader is 
unfit for the duties of the store, the shop, the factory. 
He will be looking for his heroine in the tin shop, in 
the grocery store, in the banking house, and will not 
find her. 

Those women who are indiscriminate readers of 
novels are unfit for the duties of wife, mother, sister, 
daughter — the duties of home life, the duties of a 
Christian life. There she sits at midnight, hands 
trembling, looking aghast, bursting into tears at mid- 
night over the woes of some imaginary unfortunate. 
When the morrow comes she will sit by the hour 
gazing at nothing and biting her nails into the quick. 
The carpet that was plain enough before will be 
plainer now that she has walked through tessellated 



522 BOOKS. 

halls, and the industrious companion will be more 
unattractive now that she has lounged in the king's 
park with a polished desperado. Oh, these con- 
firmed readers of novels ! They are unfit for the 
duties of Ihis life, which is a tremendous discipline, 
and they are unfit for the work of a world where all 
we gain is achieved by hard, continuous, and exhaust- 
ive work. Evil and good mixed. 

We will also help to stem this tide of pernicious 
literature by standing aloof, we and our families, 
from books which have some good, but a large 
admixture of evil. You have read books that had in 
them the good and the bad. Which stuck? The 
bad ! There are minds like sieves, which let the 
small particles of gold fall through and keep the large 
cinders, while there are intellects like loadstones 
plunged into filings of steel and brass, that will keep 
the steel and repel the brass. But it is generally just 
the opposite. You plunge through a hedge of burrs 
to get one blackberry, and you will get more burrs 
than blackberries. 1 do not care how good }^ou are, 
you cannot afford to read a bad book. 

You say, " The influence is insignificant." Ah ! 
the scratch of a pin may produce the lockjaw. You 
out of curiosity plunge into a bad book, and you have 
the curiosity of a man who takes a torch into a gun- 
powder mill to see whether or not it will blow up. 

If you want to help stem the tide of pernicious lit- 
erature, you and your families must stand back from 
books which corrupt the imagination. I refer now 
not to that literature which the villain has under 
his coat, waiting for the school to come out, then 
looking up and down the street for the police,, 
and then offering the book to your boy on his way 



BOOKS. 



523 



home. I refer not to that, but to polished literature, 
which comes forth with a cute plot sounding the 
tocsin that arouses all the bad passions of our soul. 

Years ago there came forth a French authoress 
under the assumed name of George Sand. She 
smoked cigars, she wore masculine apparel. She 
wrote with a style ardent, eloquent, graphic in its 
pictures, horrible in its suggestions, damnable in its 
results, and sending forth into the libraries and the 
homes of the world an influence which has not yet 
relaxed ; and I want to tell you that all the infamous 
stories we have got from Paris in the last five or ten 
years are only copies of that woman's iniquity. 
These books are sold by Christian booksellers. Under 
the nostrils of your cities there is to-day a fetid, reek- 
ing, unwashed literature enough to poison all the 
fountains of virtue and smite your sons and daughters 
as with the wings of a destroying angel, and it is 
high time that the ministers of religion and all 
reformers banded together and marshaled an army of 
righteousness all armed to the teeth to fight back this 
moral calamity. 

What do you make of the fact that fifty per 
cent. — more than fifty per cent. — of the criminals in 
the jails and penitentiaries of this country are under 
twenty-one years of age ; many of them under eigh- 
teen, many under sixteen, many under fifteen. You 
go along the corridors of the prisons, and you will 
find that nine out of ten came there from reading 
bad books or newspapers. The men will tell you so ; 
the women will tell you so. Is not that a fact worthy 
the consideration of those whose families are dear to 
them ? 

"Oh," you say, " I am a business man, and can't be 



524 



BOOKS. 



looking after the literature of my household ; I can't 
be examining books and newspapers ; they will have 
to look after themselves." Suppose your child was 
threatened with typhoid fever, would you have time 
to go for a doctor ? would you have time to watch 
the progress of the disease ? would you have time to 
attend the funeral? In the name of God, I warn 
some of you that your children are threatened with 
moral and spiritual typhoid, and if the evil be un- 
arrested there will be the funeral of the body, and 
the funeral of the mind, and the funeral of the soul 
— three funerals in one day. 

If you want to help stem this tide, keep aloof, you 
and your families, from all books that are apologetic 
for crime. 

Some of the most fascinating book-binding in our 
time is thrown around sin. Vice is horrible anyhow. 
Ft is born in shame, and it dies howling in the dark- 
ness. It whips one through this life with a scourge 
of scorpions, and after that God's thunders of wrath 
pursue it over boundless deserts. If you want to 
paint carnality, do not represent it as looking out 
from embroidered curtains, or from the window of a 
royal seraglio. Paint it as writhing in the horrors of 
a city hospital. 

Cursed are the books which make impurity decent, 
and crime honorable, and hypocrisy noble. Ye 
authors who write them, ye publishers who print them, 
ye booksellers who distribute them, shall be cut to 
pieces, if not by an aroused public sentiment, then by 
Almighty God, who will sweep you to the lowest pit 
of perdition, ye murderers of souls. You may escape 
in this world ; in the next the heel of calamity will 
grind you, and you will be fastened to the rock, and 



BOOKS. 525 

vultures of despair will claw at your soul, and those 
whom you have destroyed will come and torment 
you, pouring hotter coals into your suffering-, eter- 
nally rejoicing at the outcry of your pain and the 
howling of your damnation. " God shall wound the 
hairy scalp of him that goeth on in his trespasses." 

There she sits at midnight, bending over the evil 
romance. The tears are started. The color dashes 
to the cheek, and then it fades. The hands tremble 
as though a guardian angel were trying to shake the 
deadly book from her grasp. Then there is a rush of 
hot tears. The perspiration on her brow is the spray 
dashed up from the river of death. She laughs with 
a laugh that dies at its own sound. Soon in a mad- 
house she will mistake the ringlets for crawling ser- 
pents, and thrust her white hand through the bars of 
the incarceration, and then beat her head and push it 
as though she would push the scalp from the skull, 
crying, " My brain, my brain !" Oh, stand off from 
such infernal literature ! Why go sounding among 
the reefs and among the warning buoys when there 
is such a vast ocean of good literature, good books 
and good newspapers ? — an ocean on which you may 
voyage, all sail set. 

I must, in this connection, call to your mind the 
iniquitous pictorials of our time. For good pictures 
I have great admiration. An artist, with one flash, 
will do that which an author can accomplish in four 
hundred pages. Fine paintings are the aristocracy 
of art. Engravings are the democracy of art. A 
good picture on one side of a pictorial will sometimes 
do just as much good as a book of four or five hun- 
dred pages. Multiply these pictures. Put them in 
your household. If there are any sick, put them 



526 



BOOKS. 



upon the couch. Put these pictorials on your walls. 
Gather them in portfolios and albums. God speed 
the good pictures on their errands of knowledge and 
mercy. It is a mighty agency for God and the truth, 
a good picture. 

But you know our cities are to-day cursed with 
evil pictorials. These death-warrants are on every 
street. A young man purchases perhaps one copy, 
and he purchases with it his eternal discomfiture. 
That one bad picture poisons one soul, that soul 
poisons fifty souls, the fifty despoil a hundred, the 
hundred a thousand, the thousand a million, and the 
million other millions, until it will take the measuring 
line of eternity to tell the height, and the depth, and 
the ghastliness of the great undoing. A young man 
buys one copy, and he unrolls it amid roaring com- 
panions ; but long after that paper is gone the evil 
will be seen in the blasted imaginations of those who 
looked at it. Every night the Queen of Death holds 
a banquet, and these evil pictorials are the printed 
invitations to the guests. 

Alas ! that the fair brow of American art should 
be blotched with that plague spot. Oh, young man, 
buy none of that moral strychnine, do not pick up a 
nest of coiled adders for your pocket. Your heart 
will be more pure than your eye. A man is never 
better than the picture he loves to look at. Show 
me what style of pictures a man buys and I will tell 
you his character. Out of a thousand times I will 
not make one failure in judgment. When Satan fails 
to get a man to read a bad book, he sometimes cap- 
tures him by getting him to look at a bad picture. 
When Satan goes a-fishing, he does not care whether 
it is a long line or a short line, if he only hauls in his 
victim. 



BOOKS. 



527 



Oh, if in answer to this stupendous question of the 
day, a question which so many answer in the negative 
because they are in despairful mood, " Is there any- 
thing- to be done to stem this awful tide of pernicious 
literature ? " if I have shown you that there is some- 
thing for us to do, I shall have done a work that I 
will not be ashamed of in that day which shall try 
every man's work, of what sort it is. Oh, remember 
that one column of good reading may save a soul, 
that one column of bad reading may destroy a soul. 

Benjamin Franklin said that the reading of Cotton 
Mather's " Essay to Do Good " moulded his entire 
life. The assassin of Lord Russell said he entered 
crime through an evil romance. John Angell James, 
than whom England never produced a better man, 
or the Church of God honors a more consistent 
Christian, declared in his old days that he had never 
got over once having for fifteen minutes read a bad 
book. Ah ! the power of a bad book. And then the 
power of a good book. 

Years ago a clergyman passing along through the 
West, stopped at a hotel, and saw a woman copying 
from a book. He found the book was Doddridge's 
" Rise and Progress." This woman had been pleased 
with the book which she had borrowed, and was 
copying a passage that impressed her very much. 
The clergyman happened to have a copy of Dod~ 
dridge's " Rise and Progress" in his valise, and gave 
it to her. Thirty years passed along, and that clergy- 
man came to the same hotel, and was inquiring about 
the family that had lived there thirty years before, 
and was pointed to a house near by. He went there, 
and said to the woman, " Do you remember seeing 
me before ? " She said, " I don't remember ever to 



528 BOOKS. 

have seen you before." " Don't you remember thirty 
years ago a man giving you a copy of Doddridge's 
"Rise and Progress'?" " Oh, yes, I remember that; 
that saved my soul. That book I loaned to my 
neighbors, and they read it, and they all came into 
the kingdom, and we had a great revival. Do you 
see the spire of a church out yonder? That church 
was built as a consequence of that book." Oh, the 
power of a good book! Oh, the power of a bad 
book ! 

I had one book in my library of which I have never 
thought with any comfort. It was an infidel book, 
which I bought for the purpose of finding out the 
arguments against Christianity. A gentleman in my 
library one day said, "Can I borrow that book ?" I said, 
" Certainly." That book came back with some pass- 
ages marked as having especially impressed him, and 
when I heard that he had gone down in a shipwreck 
off Cape Hatteras, I asked myself the question, " I 
wonder if anything he saw in that book which he bor- 
rowed from me, could have affected his eternal 
destiny ? " 

Oh, go home to-day and examine your libraries, 
and after you have got through your libraries, 
examine the stand where the pictorials and news- 
papers are, and if you find anything there that can 
not stand the test of the judgment day, do not give it 
to others — that would despoil them ; do not sell it — 
that would be getting the price of blood ; but kindle 
a fire on your kitchen hearth or in your back-yard, 
and put the poison in and keep stirring the blaze until 
everything has gone to ashes, from preface to ap- 
pendix. 

And crowd your minds with good books, and there 



BOOKS. 



will be no room for the bad. When Thomas Chal- 
mers was riding beside a stage-driver and the horses 
were going beautifully, the stage-driver drew his 
long lash and struck the ear of the leader. It seemed 
to Thomas Chalmers a great cruelty, and he said, 
" Why did you strike that horse ; he is going splen- 
didly?" " Ah ! " said the stage-driver, "do you see 
that frightful object along the road ? I never in the 
world would have got that horse along there if I 
hadn't given him something else to think of ! " 
Thomas Chalmers went home and wrote his immortal 
sermon, " The Expulsive Power of a New Affection." 

And while you have looked after yourselves and 
looked after your families, I want you to join this 
great army enlisted against pernicious literature. 
We are going to triumph. I feel to the tips of my 
fingers and in the depths of my soul the assurance that 
righteousness is going to triumph over all iniquity. 
If God be with us, who, who can be against us? 
Lady Hester Stanhope was the daughter of the third 
Earl Stanhope, and when her relatives were all dead 
she went to the far East and took possession of a de- 
serted convent. Then she threw up fortresses amid 
the mountains of Lebanon, and invited to her castle 
all the poor and the wretched and the forsaken and 
the forgotten. Her house, her castle, was a rest for 
all the weary. 

She was a devoted Christian woman, and expected 
that the Lord Jesus Christ would come again in per- 
son and reign in this world, and she was so entranced 
with the thought that Christ would come again that 
it was too much for her brain. She had in her magnifi- 
cent stables two horses, which she kept all the time 
groomed and bridled and saddled and caparisoned, so 

34 



530 



BOOKS. 



that when the Lord should come He might take one 
horse, and she the other, and they could speed away 
to Jerusalem, the city of the Great King. Of course 
it was a fanaticism and a delusion, but there was great 
beauty even in the dream. 

Oh, my friends, we need no earthly palfreys 
groomed and bridled and saddled and caparisoned 
for our Lord, when He comes to put down iniquity. 
The horse is already in the Heavenly equerry, and 
the imperial rider is about to mount. "And I saw, 
and behold a white horse : and He that sat on him 
had a bow, and a crown was given unto Him : and ^ 
He went forth conquering and to conquer." Horse- 
men of Heaven, mount ! Cavalrymen of God, ride 
on ! Charge, charge ! until they shall be hurled back, 
the black horse of famine, the red horse of carnage, 
the pale horse of death. Jesus, forever ! 



CHAPTER LIII. 



ARE THEATRES IMPROVING? 

As near as I can tell, it is about half-past four 
o'clock in the morning. Signs of dawn all around 
the sky. Caverns full of darkness, but the mountains 
are being transfigured. The sun is coming up, 
although coming very slowly. The world progresses. 

Since the armies of civilization and Christianity 
started on their march, they have not fallen back an 
inch. There have been regiments cowardly, which 
have retreated and surrendered to the enemy, just as 
in all armies there are those unworthy the standard 
they carry ; but the great host of God has been 
answering to the command given at the start of, 
" Forward, march ! " 

Have the entertainments and the recreations of the 
world kept abreast in this grand march of the ages ? 
Are the novels of our day superior to those that are 
past? Is the dance of this decade an improvement 
upon the dance of other decades ? Are the opera 
houses rendering grander music than that which they 
rendered in other times? Are parlor games more 
healthful than they used to be ? Are the theatres 
advancing in moral tone ? Mark you, I am not to 
discuss whether the theatre is right or wrong. I am 
not to make wholesale attack upon tragedians and 
comedians. There are a hundred questions in regard 
to the theatre that might be asked which I shall not 

53i 



532 ARE THEATRES IMPROVING? 



this morning answer, the most of them having been 
answered at some other time in this pulpit. You say 
that Henry Irving, and Edwin Booth, and John Mc- 
Cullough, and Joseph Jefferson are great actors, and 
are honorable men. I believe it. The question that 
I am to discuss to-day is : Are the theatres advancing 
in high moral tone? and I shall in no wise be diverted 
from that discussion. 

There are three or four reasons for answering this 
question in the negative, and the first is the combined 
and universal testimony of all the secular newspapers 
of the land that are worth anything. There is not a 
secular newspaper of any power in the United States 
which has not within the past few years, both in edi- 
torial and reportorial column, reprehended the styles 
of play most frequent. It is contrary to the financial 
interests of the secular newspaper severely to criticise 
the playhouse, because from it comes the largest ad- 
vertising patronage, larger than from any other 
source, thousands and tens of thousands of dollars a 
year. When, therefore, the secular newspapers of 
the land, contrary to their financial interests, severely 
criticise the playhouse for imbecile and impure spec- 
tacular, their testimony is to me conclusive. On the 
negative side of this question I roll up all the respect, 
able printing-presses of America. 

Another reason for answering this question in the 
negative is the depraved advertisements on the bulle- 
tin boards and on the board fences and in the show 
windows, from ocean to ocean. I take it for granted 
that those advertisements are honest, and that night 
by night are depicted the scenes there advertised. 
Are those the scenes to which parents take their sons 
and daughters, and young men their affianced? 



ARE THEATRES IMPROVING? 



533 



Would you allow in your parlor such brazen inde- 
cency enacted as is dramatized every night in some 
of the theaters of America, unless their advertise- 
ments be a libel? If the pictures be genuine, the 
scenes are damnable. 

That which is wrong in a parlor is wrong on a 
stage. It ought to require just as much complete- 
ness of apparel to be honorable in one place as to be 
honorable in another. If you, fathers and mothers, 
take your sons and daughters to see such Sodomite 
lack of robe, and then, in after time, the plowshare 
of libertinism and profligacy should go through your 
own household, you will get what you deserve. It 
seems as if, having obtained a surplus of sanctity 
during the Lenten services, right after Easter, all 
through the United States, the streets become a pic- 
ture gallery which rival the museums of Pompeii, 
which are kept under lock and key. Where are the 
mayors of the cities, and the judges of the courts, 
and the police, that they allow such things? When 
our cities are blotched with these depraved adver- 
tisements is it not some reason why we should think 
that the theaters of this country are not very rapidly 
advancing toward millennial excellence? 

Another reason for answering this question in the 
negative is the large importation of bad morals from 
foreign countries to the American stage. France 
sent one of her queens of the stage to this country, 
her infamy, instead of a shame, a boast. Never a 
more popular actress on the American stage, and 
never one more dissolute. Thousands and tens of 
thousands of professed Christian men and women 
went and burned incense before that goddess of 
debauchery. England, too, has sent her delectable 



534 



ARE THEATRES IMPROVING? 



specimens of ineffable sweetness commended by 
foreign princes, not as good as their mother. When 
I take into consideration this large importation of 
bad morals from foreign parts, I come to the conclu- 
sion that the American theatres are not, as a general 
thing, advancing in moral tone. 

Another reason for answering this question in the 
negative is the fact that the vast majority of the 
plays of the day are degenerate. I will not name 
many of them, because I might advertise that which 
I condemn, and the mere mention of them would be 
a perfidy. If I mention any they must be those that 
are a little past, but which may come back again 
when the American taste wants a change of carrion. 
Take the plays of the last fifteen years, and I will 
admit that one-tenth of them are unobjectionable, 
but the nine-tenths of them are unfit to be looked at 
by the families of America. Subtract from them the 
libertinism and the domestic intrigue and the inu- 
endo and the vulgarity and the marital scandalism, 
and you would leave those plays powerless in the 
dramatic market. 

Put side by side the plays of the time of Macready 
and the elder Booth and the modern plays, and you 
will find there has been an awful decadence. I have 
not seen those plays, but I have taken the testimony 
of authentic witnesses, and I have seen the skillful 
analyses by critics — a score of critics — among them 
such men as Dr. Buckley, of New York, men who 
have read scores of the plays and who can report in 
regard to them — I take the testimony of those who 
witnessed the plays, and then I take the testimony of 
the critics who like the theater and who do not like 
it, — I put them all together, and I find a moral 
decadence. 



ARE THEATRES IMPROVING? 535 

If you who took your families to see East Lynne 
will now in your cooler moments read the manuscript 
of that play — read the printed play, and go through 
the fetid and malodorous chapters in which dishonest 
womanhood is chased from iniquity to iniquity, you 
will be able to judge for yourself whether that is an 
improved drama. You might as well go into the 
grogshop of the village hotel and sit down among 
the bevy of village loafers expecting to get any moral 
elevation as to get any moral elevation from a play 
like the " Ticket of Leave Man," full of villainous 
pictures and low slang. The play entitled " A New 
Way to Pay Old Debts " is a eulogy, a practical 
eulogy on deception practised on the bad, and men 
and women never come from seeing that play as 
pure as when they went in. " She Stoops to Con- 
quer" is as full of moral miasma as the Roman 
Campagna is full of typhus fever on a summer night. 
You may write Oliver Goldsmith above it and 
beneath it and at the close of each act, but you can 
not cover up the profane and the salacious. The 
" School for Scandal " is rotten clear through with 
lasciviousness, and if a man should come into your 
house and take that play from under his arm and read 
it to your family, all the bones that were left in his 
body unbroken would not be worth mentioning. 

But who could mention all the Don Caesars, and 
the barmaids, and the Peg Worhngtons, and the 
Courtleighs, and the Lady Gay Spankers, and the 
poltroons, and the scapegraces, and the people minus 
all excellency plus all abomination, who gather men, 
women, boys, and girls by tens of thousands every 
night in the lazaretto of the average American 
theater. It is estimated that there are one thousand 



536 



ARE THEATRES IMPROVING? 



boys in Brooklyn every night breathing that pesti- 
lence. Hear it, ye whose sons stay out until II 
o'clock at night, and you do not know where they 
are! Hear it, ye philanthropists who want this 
generation better than the generations that have 
gone by ! 

Once in a while a great tragedian will render 
"King Lear," or "Merchant of Venice," or "Hamlet," 
before entranced audiences, but those plays as com- 
pared with the imbecile and depraved plays on the 
American stage to-day, are as the few drops of pure 
blood to the bad blood in a man who has passed out 
from yellow fever into Asiatic cholera, and is now 
winding up with first-class small-pox. Now, I say 
the majority of the plays of this country being bad 
in their influence, I have a right to conclude that the 
theaters of America, take them as an average, are 
not coming to any very large moral improvement. 

Now, I demand that as men and women who love 
the best interests of society, that we band together 
to snatch the drama from its debased surroundings. 
I demand that as philanthropists and Christians, we 
rescue the drama. 

The drama is not the theater. The theater is a 
human institution. The drama is a literary expres- 
sion of something which God implanted in nearly 
all of our souls. People talk as though it were some- 
thing built up entirely outside of us by the Con- 
greves and the Sheridans and the Shakespeares of 
literature. Oh, no. It is an echo of something 
divinely put within us. You see it in your little 
child three or four years of age, with the dolls and 
the cradles and the carts. You see it ten years after 
in the parlor charades. You see it after in the im- 



ARE THEATRES IMPROVING? 



537 



personations at the Academy of Music. You see it 
on Thanksgiving Day, when we decorate the house 
of God with the fruits and harvests of the earth, that 
spectacular arousing our gratitude. We see it on 
Easter morn, when we spell out on the walls of 
the house of God in flowers the words: "He is 
Risen," that spectacular arousing our emotion. Every 
parent likes it, and demonstrates it when he goes to 
see the school exhibition with its dialogues and its 
droll costumes. It is evidenced in the torchlight 
procession amid great political excitement, that torch- 
light procession only a dramatization of the political 
principles proclaimed. 

Dithyrambic drama, romantic drama, sentimental 
drama, all an echo of the human soul. Farquhar and 
Congreve put in English literature only that which 
was in the English heart. Thespis and Eschylus 
dramatized only that which was in the Greek heart ; 
Seneca and Plautus dramatized only that which was 
in the Roman heart ; Racine and Alfieri dramatized 
only that which was in the French and the Italian 
heart; Shakespeare dramatized only that which was 
in the world's heart. But this divine principle is not 
to be despoiled and dragged into the service of sin. 
It is our business to rescue it, to lift it up, to bring it 
back, to exalt it. Will you suppress it? You might as 
well try to suppress its Creator. Just as we cultivate 
the beautiful and the sublime in taste by bird-haunted 
glen and roystering stream and cascade let down 
over moss-covered rocks, and the day setting up its 
banners of victory in the east, and passing out the 
gates of the west, setting everything on fire, the 
Austerlitz aad the Waterloo of a July thunder-storm 
blazing its batteries into a sultry afternoon, and the 



538 ARE THEATRES IMPROVING? 

round tear of the world wet on the cheek of the 
night — as by these things we try to culture a taste 
for the sublime and the beautiful, so we are to 
culture this dramatic taste by staccato passages in 
literature, by antithesis and synthesis, by all tragic 
passages in human life. 

We are to take this dramatic element and we are 
to harness it for God. Because it has been taken into 
the service of sin is nothing against it. You might 
as well denounce music because in Corinth and Her- 
culaneum it was used to demonstrate and set forth 
depravity and turpitude. Shall we not enthrone 
music on the organ because music again and again 
has been trampled under the foot of impious dance? 
Because there are pollutions in art shall we turn 
back upon Church's " Niagara," or Powers' " Greek 
Slave," or Rubens' " Descent from the Cross," or 
Michael Angelo's " Last Judgment "? Because these 
things have been dragged into the service of sin is 
the very reason that you and I should take the drama 
out and harness it for God and the truth. You Sab- 
bath-school teachers' want more of the dramatic ele- 
ment in your work, in your recital of the Bible scene, 
in the anecdote that you tell, in the descriptive 
gesture, in the impersonation of the character you 
present — you want more of the dramatic element. I 
can tell in looking over an audience of Sabbath-school 
children in which teacher the dramatic element is 
dominant, and in which the didactic element is 
dominant. 

Oh, there are hundreds of people who are trying 
to do good. Have less of the didactic element, and 
have more of the dramatic. The tendency in our 
time is to drone religion, to moan religion, to croak 



ARE THEATRES IMPROVING? 539 
* 

religion, to sepulcherize religion, when it ought to be 
put in animated and spectacular manner. 

I say to all those young men who are preparing for 
the Gospel ministry, go to your libraries, and you 
will find that those who bring most souls to God, 
bring most into the kingdom of our Lord Jesus 
Christ, are dramatic. John Knox, dramatic ; Thomas 
Chalmers, dramatic : Robert M'Cheyne, dramatic ; 
Rowland Hill, dramatic ; Robert Hall, dramatic ; 
Robert South, dramatic ; Fenelon, dramatic ; George 
Whitefield, dramatic; Dr. John Mason, dramatic; 
Bourdaloue, dramatic ; Dr. Knott, dramatic ; George 
W. Bethune, dramatic. And you have a right to 
cultivate that element in your nature. Oh, young 
men preparing for Christian work, and though you 
may meet with mighty rebuff and caricature if you 
attempt it, and though you may be arraigned by 
church courts who will try to put you down, the 
Lord will start you, and He will keep you all through, 
and great will be the reward for the assiduous and 
the plucky. 

Oh, my friends, we want in all our work to freshen 
up. We want to freshen up, you in your sphere and 
I in mine. Great discussions in religious newspapers 
about why people do not come to church. 

I will tell you. You cannot take the old hackneyed 
phrases that have come snoring down through the 
centuries and arrest the attention of the masses. 
People in religious work do not want the sham flow- 
ers bought in a millinery shop, but the japonicas wet 
with the morning dew. They do not want the bones 
of the extinct megatherium of the past, but the liv- 
ing reindeer caught last August at the edge of 
Schroon Lake. We need, all of us, to drive out of 



54° ARE THEATRES IMPROVING? 

our religious work the drowsy and the tedious and 
the didatic, and bring in the brightness and the vivac- 
ity and the holy sarcasm and the sanctified wit and 
the epigrammatic power and the blood-red earnest- 
ness, and we will get it through the sanctified drama. 

But let me say to hundreds of young men, do not 
let your fondness for the dramatic lead you into sin. 
While God has given you this faculty, cultivate it, 
and cultivate it in the right direction. Admire it 
when it is used for God. Abhor it when it is used 
for sin. We do not try to suppress it in you. Do 
not misrepresent us. We would have it directed ; 
we would have it educated ; we would have it har- 
nessed for multiplicand usefulness. In nowise sup- 
press it. Gather all your faculties, and this among 
the others, and consecrate them to the Lord Jesus 
Christ. 



CHAPTER LIV. 



ROMANCE OF CRIME. 

In our time, you know as well as I, that there is a 
disposition to put a halo around iniquity if it is com- 
mitted in conspicuous place, and if it is wide resound- 
ing and of large proportions. In this land to-day 
there are hundreds of men hiding behind the com- 
munion tables and in churches of Jesus Christ, who 
have no business to be there as professors of religion. 
They expect to be all right with God, although they 
are all wrong with man. And while I want you. to 
understand that by the deeds of the law no flesh liv- 
ing can be justified, and a mere honest life can not 
enter us into Heaven, I want you as plainly to under- 
stand that unless the life is right the heart is not 
right. Grace in the heart, and grace in the life ; so 
we must preach sometimes the faith of the Gospel, 
and sometimes the morality of the Gospel. 

It seems to me there has not been a time in the last 
fifty years when this latter truth needed more thor- 
oughly to be presented in the American churches. It 
needs to be presented to-day. 

A missionary in the islands of the Pacific preached 
one Sabbath on honesty and dishonesty, and on Mon- 
day he found his yard full of all styles of goods which 
the natives had brought. He could not understand 
it until a native told him : "Our gods permit us to 
purloin goods, but the God you told us about yester- 

54i 



542 



ROMANCE OF CRIME. 



day, the God of Heaven and earth, it seems, is against 
these practices, and so we brought all the goods that 
do not belong to us, and they are in the yard, and we 
want you to help us to distribute them among their 
rightful owners." And if in all the pulpits of the 
United States to-day rousing sermons could be 
preached on honesty and the evils of dishonesty, and 
the sermons were blessed of God, and arrangement 
should be made by which all- the goods which have 
been improperly taken from one man and appropri- 
ated by another man should be put in the City Halls 
of the country, there is not a City Hall in the United 
States that would not be. crowded from cellar to 
cupola. Faith of the Gospel — that we must preach 
and we do preach. Morality of the Gospel we must 
just as certainly proclaim. 

Now look abroad and see the fascinations that are 
thrown around different styles of crime. The ques- 
tion that every man and woman has asked has been, 
Should crime be excused because it is on a large 
scale? Is iniquity guilty and to be pursued of the 
law in proportion as it is on a small scale ? Shall we 
have New York Tombs for the man who steals an 
overcoat from a hat-rack, and all Canada for a man 
to range in if he have robbed the public of three 
millions ? 

Look upon all the fascinations thrown around fraud 
in this country. You know that for years men have 
been made heroes of and pictorialized and in various 
styles presented to the public, as though sometimes 
they were worthy of admiration if they have scattered 
the funds of banks, or swallowed great estates that 
did not belong to them. Our young men have been 
dazed with this quick accumulation. They have 



ROMANCE OF CRIME. 



543 



said, " That's the way to do it. What's the use of our 
plodding on with small wages or insignificant salary, 
when we may go into business life, and with some 
stratagem achieve such a fortune as that man has 
achieved ? " A different measure has been applied to 
the crime of Wall Street from that which has been 
applied to the spoils which the man carries up Rat 
Alley. 

So a peddler came down from Vermont some 
years ago, took hold of the money-market of New 
York, flaunted his abominations in the sight of all the 
people, defied public morals every day of his life. 
Young men looked up and said, 4< He was a peddler 
in one decade, and in the next decade he is one of the 
monarchs of the stock market. That's the way to 
do it." 

There has been an irresistible impression going 
abroad among young men that the poorest way to 
get money is to earn it. The young man of flaunting 
cravat says to the young man of humble apparel, 
"What, you only get eighteen hundred dollars a year ? 
Why, that wouldn't keep me in pin-money. I spend 
five thousand dollars a year." " Where do you get 
it?" asks the plain young man. " Oh, stocks, enter- 
prises, all that sort of thing, you know." The plain 
young man has hardly enough money to pay his 
board, has to wear clothes after they are out of fash- 
ion, and deny himself all luxuries. After a while he 
gets tired of his plodding, and he goes to the man 
who has achieved suddenly large estate, and he says, 
" Just show me how it is done." And he is shown. 
He soon learns how, and although he is almost all the 
time idle now, and has resigned his position in the 
bank, or the factory, or the store, he has more money 



544 



ROMANCE OF CRIME. 



than he ever had, trades off his old silver watch for a 
gold one with a flashing chain, sets his hat a little 
further over on the side of his head than he ever did, 
smokes better cigars, and more of them. He has his 
hand in ! Now, if he can escape the penitentiary for 
three or four years, he will get into political circles, 
and he will get political jobs, and will have some- 
thing to do with harbors, and pavements, and docks. 
Now he has got so far along he is safe for perdition. 

It is quite a long road sometimes for a man to 
travel before he gets into the romance of crime. 
Those are caught who are only in the prosaic stage 
of it. If the sheriffs and constables would only leave 
them alone a little while, they would steal as well as 
anybody. They might not be able to steal a whole 
railroad, but they could master a load of pig iron. 

Now I always thank God when I find an estate like 
that go to smash. It is plague-struck, and it blasts 
the nation. I thank God when it goes into such a 
wreck it can never be gathered up again. I want 
it to become so loathsome and such an insuf- 
ferable stench that honest young men will take warn 
ing. If God should put into money or its represen- 
tative the capacity to go to its lawful owner, there 
would not be a bank or a safety deposit in the United 
States whose walls would not be blown out, and 
mortgages would rip, and parchments would rend, 
and gold would shoot, and beggars would get on 
horseback, and stock gamblers would go to the 
almshouse. 

How many dishonesties in the making out of in- 
voices, and in the plastering of false labels, and in the 
filching of customers of rival houses, and in the 
making and breaking of contracts. Young men are 



ROMANCE OF CRIME. 



545 



indoctrinated in the idea that the sooner they get 
money the better, and the getting of it on a larger 
scale only proves to them their greater ingenuity. 
There is a glitter thrown around about all these 
things. Young men have got to find out that God 
looks upon sin in a very different light. 

A young man stood behind the counter in New 
York selling silks to a lady, and he said before the 
sale was consummated : " I see there is a flaw in that 
silk." The lady recognized it, and the sale was not 
consummated. The head man of the firm saw the 
interview, and he wrote home to the father of the 
young man living in the country, saying : " Dear sir, 
come and take your boy ; he will never make a mer- 
chant." The father came down from the country 
home in great consternation, as any father would, 
wondering what his boy had done. He came to the 
store, and the merchant said to him : " Why, your 
son pointed out a flaw in some silk the other day, 
and spoiled the sale, and we will never have that lady, 
probably, again for a customer, and your son never 
will make a merchant." " Is that all?" said the 
father. " I am proud of him. I wouldn't for the 
world have him another day under your influence. 
John, get your hat and come ; let us start." There 
are hundreds of young men under the pressure, under 
the fascinations thrown around about commercial 
iniquity. Thousands of young men have gone down 
under the pressure ; other thousands have maintained 
their integrity. God help you ! Let me say to you, 
my young friend, that you can be a great deal 
happier in poverty than you ever can be happy in 
a prosperity which comes from ill-gotten gains. 
" Oh," you say, " I might lose my place. It is easy 

35 



546 



ROMANCE OF CRIME. 



for you to stand there and talk, but it is no easy 
thing to get a place when you have lost it. Besides 
that, I have a widowed mother depending upon my 
exertions, and you must not be too reckless in giving 
advice to me." Ah, my young friend, it is always 
safe to be right, but it is never safe to be wrong. 
You go home and tell your mother the pressure 
under which you are in that store, and I know what 
she will say to you if she is worthy of you. She will 
say : " My son, come out from there ; Christ has 
taken care of us all these years, and He will take 
care of us now ; come out of that." 

And remember that the man who gets his gain by 
iniquity will soon lose it all. One moment after his 
departure from life he will not own an opera house, 
he will not own a certificate of stock, he will not own 
one dollar of government securities, and the poorest 
boy that stands on the street with a penny in his 
pocket, looking at the funeral procession of the dead 
cheat as it goes by, will have more money than that 
man who one week ago boasted that he controlled 
the money market. 

Oh, there is such a fearful fascination in this day 
about the use of trust funds. 

It has got to be popular to take the funds of others 
and speculate with them. There may be many in 
this house who are practicing that iniquity. Almost 
every man in the course of his life has the property 
of others put in his care. He has administered, per- 
haps, for a dead friend ; he is an attorney, and money 
passes from debtor to creditor through his hands ; or 
he is in a commercial establishment, and gets a salary 
for the discharge of his responsibilities ; or he is 
treasurer of a philanthropic* institution, and money 



ROMANCE OF CRIME. 547 

for the suffering goes through his hands ; or he has 
some office in city, or State, or nation, and taxes, and 
subsidies, and supplies, and salaries are in his hands. 
Now, that is a trust. That is as sacred a trust as 
God can give a man. It is the concentration of con- 
fidence. Now, when that man takes that money — 
the money of others — and goes to speculating with it 
for his own purposes, he is guilty of theft, falsehood, 
and perjury, and in the most intense sense of the 
word is a miscreant. 

There are families to-day — widows and orphans — 
with nothing between them and starvation but a 
sewing machine, or kept out of the vortex by the 
thread of a needle red with the blood of their hearts, 
who were by father or husband left a competency. 
You read the story in the newspaper of those who 
have lost by a bank defalcation, and it is only one 
line, the name of a woman you never heard of, and 
just one or two figures telling the amount of stock 
she had, the number of shares. It is a very short 
line in a newspaper, but it is a line of agony long as 
time ; it is a story long as eternity. 

Now, do not come under the fascination which in- 
duces men to employ trust-funds for purposes of their 
own speculation. Cultivate old-fashioned honesty. 
Remember the example of Wellington, who, when he 
was leading the British army over the French fron- 
tier, and his army was very hungry, and there was 
plenty of plunder on the French frontier, and some 
of the men wanted to take it, he said : " Soldiers, do 
not touch that ; God will take care of us ; He will 
take care of the English army ; plenty of plunder, I 
know, all around, but do not take it." He told the 
story afterward himself, how that the French people 



548 



ROMANCE OF CRIME. 



brought to him their valuables to keep — he, supposed 
to be their enemy — brought him their valuables to 
keep. And then he said, at a time when the credi- 
tors of the army were calling for money and for pay 
all the time, and they had so much all around about 
he did not feel it right for him to take it, or for the 
army to take it. An author beautifully wrote in re- 
gard to it : " Nothing can be grander or more noble 
and original than this admission. This old soldier, 
after thirty years of service, this iron man and vic- 
torious general, established in an enemy's country, at 
the head of an immense army, is afraid of his credi- 
tors. This is a kind of fear that has seldom troubled 
conquerors and victors, and I doubt if the annals of 
war present anything comparable to this sublime 
simplicity." 

Oh, that God would scatter these fascinations 
about fraud, and let us all understand that if I steal 
from you one dollar I am a thief, and if I steal from 
you $500,000 I am five hundred thousand times more 
of a thief ! 

So there has been a great deal of fascination 
thrown around libertinism. 

Society is very severe upon the impurity that 
lurks around the alleys and low haunts of the town. 
The law pursues it, smites it, incarcerates it, tries to 
destroy it. You know as well as I that society 
becomes lenient in proportion as impurity becomes 
affluent or is in elevated circles, and finally society 
is silent, or disposed to palliate. Where is the judge, 
the jury, the police officer that dare arraign the 
wealthy libertine? He walks the streets, he rides 
the parks, he flaunts his iniquity in the eyes of the 
pure. The hag of uncleanness looks out of the 



ROMANCE OF CRIME. 



549 



tapestried window. Where is the law that dares 
take the brazen wretches and put their faces in an 
iron frame of a State prison window? 

Sometimes it seems to me as if society were going 
back to the state of morals of Herculaneum, when it 
sculptured its vileness on pillars and temple wall, and 
nothing but the lava of a burning mountain could 
hide the immensity of crime. At what time God will 
rise up, and extirpate these evils upon society I know 
not, nor whether He will do it by fire, or hurricane, 
or earthquake ; but a Holy God I do not think will 
stand it much longer. I believe the thunderbolts are 
hissing hot, and that when God comes to chastise the 
community for these sins, against which He has 
uttered Himself more bitterly than against any other, 
the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah will be tolerable as 
compared with the fate of our modern society, which 
knew better, but did worse. 

We want about ten thousand pulpits in America to 
thunder: "All adulterers and whoremongers shall 
have their place in the hell that burneth with fire and 
brimstone, which is the second death." It is hell on 
earth, and hell forever. We have got to understand 
in Brooklyn and New York, and all parts of this 
land, that iniquity on Madison Square, or Brooklyn 
Heights, or Beacon Hill, is as damnable in the sight 
of God as it is in the slums. Whether it has canopied 
couch of eider-down, or dwells amid the putridity of 
a low tenement-house, God is after it in His ven- 
geance. Yet the pulpit of the Christian Church has 
been so cowed down on this subject that it hardly 
dares speak, and men are almost apologetic when 
they read the Ten Commandments. 

Then look at the fascinations thrown around assas- 
sination. 



5'5o 



ROMANCE OF CRIME. 



There are in all communities men who have taken 
the lives of others unlawfully, not as executioners of 
the law and they go scot free. You say they had 
their provocations. God gave life, and He alone 
has a right to take it, and He may take it by visita- 
tion of Providence, or by an executioner of the law, 
who is His messenger. But when a man assumes 
that divine prerogative he touches the lowest depth 
of crime. 

Society is alert for certain kinds of murder. If a 
citizen going along the road at night is waylaid and 
slain by a robber, we all want the villain arrested and 
executed. For all garroting, for all beating out of 
life by a club, or an axe, or a slungshot, the law has 
quick spring and heavy stroke ; but you know that 
when men get affluent and high position, and they 
avenge their wrongs by taking the lives of others, 
great sympathy is excited; lawyers plead, ladies 
weep, judge halts, jury is bribed, and the man goes 
free. If the verdict happen to be against him, a new 
trial is called on through some technicality, and they 
adjourn for witnesses that never come, and adjourn 
and adjourn until the community has forgotten all 
about it, and then the prison door opens, and the 
murderer goes free. 

Now, if capital punishment can be right, I say let 
the life of the polished murderer go with the life of 
the vulgar assassin. Let us- have no partiality of 
hemp, no aristocracy of gallows. Do not let us float 
back to barbarism, when every man was his own 
judge, jury and executioner, and that man had the 
supremacy who had the sharpest knife, and the 
strongest arm, and the quickest step, and the steal- 
thiest revenge. He who wilfully and in hatred takes 



ROMANCE OF CRIME. 



551 



the life of another is a murderer, I care not what the 
provocation or the circumstances. He may be 
cleared by an enthusiastic court-room, he may be 
sent by the Government of the United States as 
Minister to Spain, as on one occasion, or modern 
literature may polish the crime until it looks like 
heroism ; but in the sight of God murder is murder, 
and the judgment day will so reveal it. 

Now, do not be fascinated by the glamour thrown 
over crime of whatever sort. Because others have 
habits that seem brilliant, but yet at the same time 
are wicked, do not choose such faults. Stand in- 
dependent of all such influences. Put your confi- 
dence in the Lord God. He will be your strength. 
" Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord." 
Cultivate old-fashioned honesty. 



CHAPTER LV. 



ABUSE OF TRUST-FUNDS. 

The columns of our custom-houses and of the State 
and National capitol swathed in black, and all the 
flags at half mast for the dead treasurer. 

At sixty-six years of age he dies, without a spot 
upon his reputation, although much of his life had 
been spent amid temptations which have flung a vast 
multitude flat into the dust. Amid all the allure- 
ments of the legal profession, and amid the oppor- 
tunity of bribe-taking on the judicial bench, and for 
three years holding the purse of the nation, yet not a 
half penny sticking to his hand. And in his dying 
hour he asks his attendant to take from the left pocket 
of his coat a check and get it cashed immediately, so 
that he meets the expenses of his own obsequies with 
his own hand ; and after paying his way all through 
life by hard work, pays his own admission fee at the 
door of the sepulchre. All his accounts square with 
the United States Government, square with the world, 
and, I hope, square with God. What a glorious 
background to the picture of present epidemic of 
swindle amid trust-funds ! 

There has not been a time in my memory, or in 
yours, when there has been such utter black irre- 
sponsibility demonstrated among those who have in 
charge the finances of others. This unroofing of 
banks, this disappearance of administrators with the 

552 



ABUSE OF TRUST-FUNDS. 



553 



funds of large estates, this disorder in postoffice 
accounts, this deficit amid United States officials, have 
made a pestilence of crime which solemnizes every 
thinking- man and woman, and leads every philanthro- 
pist and Christian to ask, "Can this plague be stayed ?" 
There is abroad this hour a simoon, a typhoon, a 
sirocco. Things in this regard are worse and worse. 
I have sometimes asked myself if it would not be bet- 
ter for men making wills to bequeath their money 
directly to the executors and the officers of courts, 
and then appoint the widows and orphans as a com- 
mittee to see that the officers and trustees of funds 
get all that does not belong to them ! 

There are men — you know them and I know them — 
who are sailing yachts, and driving fast horses, and 
holding membership in expensive clubs, and owning 
country seats, who would not be worth a dollar if 
they returned to others their just rights. A crash 
comes, and there is a reverse, and the man fails, and 
he retires from the world, and seems about to go into 
monastic life ; but in two or three years he blossoms 
out again, having compromised with his creditors — 
that is, paid them nothing but regrets — and the only 
difference between the second chapter of prosperity 
and the first chapter of prosperity is, that in his pic- 
ture gallery now he has Raphaels and Murillos in- 
stead of Kensetts, and his horses go the mile twenty 
seconds sooner than their predecessors, and instead 
of one country seat he has three. 1 have watched 
and I have noticed that nine out of ten of the failures 
in what is' called high life leave men with more 
money after the failure than they had before, and 
that their failure is only a stratagem to get rid of the 
payment of honest debts, and to put the world off the 



554 



ABUSE OF TRUST FUNDS. 



the track while they introduce a more stupendous 
swindle. 

It is, my Christian friends, most appalling that 
these things are possible. I blame, first of all, direc- 
tors of banks and boards having in charge great 
financial interests. It ought not be possible for the 
president of a bank, or the cashier, or any officer to 
carry on a swindle in an institution year after year 
and year after year without detection. If a swindle 
go on one year, two years, three years, four years in 
a moneyed institution, the directors either have part 
in the infamy and pocket their share of the theft, or 
they are guilty of a negligence for which God will 
hold them as responsible as He holds the acknowl- 
edged defrauders. What right have our large busi- 
ness men to allow their names to be advertised as 
directors, so that the unsophisticated put their money 
in the institution, or buy script thereof, when the 
directors are doing nothing for the safety of that in- 
stitution? It is a deception appalling and monstrous, 
and in the name of God and the rights of men I 
denounce it. 

Many, with small surplus and with money not 
needed for immediate use, but which will, after a 
while, be indispensable, have no friends capable of 
advising them, and, in consequence, they take the 
moral character of men advertised as directors. And 
there are people who say, "I don't know anything 
about these things, but there is a man who is in that 
board of directors, and there is a man, and there is a 
man, and I know they "are all good men, and pros- 
perous business men, and they would not have any- 
thing to do with that which is dishonorable." When 
the bank goes over, then the small earnings and the for- 



ABUSE OF TRUST FUNDS. 



555 



tunes of widows and orphans and the helplessly aged 
go with the bank, and the directors stand with idiotic 
stare, and when the inquiry is made by the frenzied 
depositors and stockholders, and when outraged com- 
munity arraigns them, the directors say : " Oh, I 
thought it was all right ; I didn't know there was 
anything wrong." They ought to have known. 
They stood in a position where they deluded the 
public with the idea that they did know, and that they 
were carefully observant of what was going on. Ad- 
vertised as directors, they did not direct. They had 
all the account books open before them, and they 
could have audited the accounts for themselves, or 
they could have taken in some expert, and had the 
whole thing understood. There are, it seems, many 
business men who have a pride in being directors in 
a great many institutions, and they know nothing 
about some of those institutions, except whether they 
get their dividends or not, and their name is used as 
a decoy duck to get other people to come near enough 
to be made game of. 

It is needed that five thousand directors of banks, 
and of insurance companies, and of moneyed institu- 
tions to-morrow resign or attend to their business. 
Just as long as fraud is so easy in business life there 
will be plenty of it. When you arrest the president 
of a bank and the cashier of a bank for embezzlement, 
you want plenty of sheriffs out that day to arrest all 
the directors. They are all guilty either of neglect 
or of complicity, if an embezzlement be going on 
three or four years. 

" Oh," says some one, "you had better preach the 
Gospel and let business men go." My reply is, if 
your Gospel does not inspire common honesty in 



556 ABUSE OF TRUST FUNDS. 

dealings among men, the sooner you close up that 
Gospel and throw it into the depths of the Atlantic 
the better. 

An orthodox swindler is worse than a heterodox 
swindler, and your recitation of creeds, and cathe- 
chisms, and a sip out of every communion chalice 
that ever glittered in Christendom, will not save your 
soul unless your business life corresponds with your 
Christian profession. The purest institution on earth 
is the Church, and there are more men and women 
of elevated character in the Christian Church than in 
any fifty institutions the world has ever seen ; but I 
declare what everybody knows when I say that some 
of the greatest scoundrels in the world have belonged 
to the Church. That time must cease when men 
practicing dishonesty all the week can sit in church 
and get fat on sermons about heaven, when the pulpit 
ought to preach that which would either bring them 
to repentance for their sin, or thunder them out of 
the Christian communion, where their presence is a 
sacrilege and an infamy. 

We must especially deplore recent events in that 
they damage the banking institution, which is the 
great convenience of the centuries, indispensable to 
commerce, and the advance of nations. With one 
hand the bank blesses the lender, and with the other 
the borrower. It was born of the necessities of the 
ages, and is venerable with the marks of thousands 
of years. More than two hundred years before 
Christ the Bank of Ilium existed, and paid its de- 
positors ten per cent. The Bible in more than one 
place regulates the rate of interest. The Bank of 
Venice was established in 1 171, and had such high 
credit that its bills were at a premium above coins 



ABUSE OF TRUST FUNDS. 



557 



which were frequently clipped. The Bank of Venice 
founded in 1345. The Bank of Barcelona founded 
in 1401. The Bank of Amsterdam founded in 1609. 
The Bank of Hamburg- founded in 1619, its circu- 
lation based on great silver bars in the vaults. Bank 
of England started by William Patterson in 1694, 
and to this day managing the immense debt of Eng- 
land. The Bank of Scotland founded in 1695. The 
Bank of Ireland founded in 1783. The Bank of North 
America planned by Robert Morris in 1781, without 
whose financial help all the bravery of our grand- 
fathers would not have achieved American inde- 
pendence. And now we have banks by the thousand. 
On their broad shoulders are the interest of private 
individual and great corporations. In them are the 
great arteries through which runs the current of a 
nation's life. They have been the rescuers of thou- 
sands of financiers in day of business exigency. They 
stand for accommodation, for facility, for individual, 
State, and national relief, and at their head and in 
their management there is as much integrity and 
moral worth as in any class of men, and probably 
more. How nefarious, then, the behavior of those 
who bring disrepute upon this venerable, benign, and 
God-honored institution. 

Recent events are very much to be deplored, 
because they seem to fly into the face of that divine 
goodness which seems determined to bless this land. 
Here we are in the fourth great national harvest, the 
last greater than all. The sheaves have hardly got 
into the garner. The wheat gamblers get hold the 
wheat, the corn gamblers get hold the corn. The 
great ocean tide of God's mercy put back by these 
dykes of dishonest resistance. When God provides 



558 



ABUSE OF TRUST FUNDS. 



enough food and clothing to feed and apparel this 
nation like princes, dishonest men scrabble for more 
than their share, and run all hazards and keep every- 
thing rocking with uncertainty, and good people say, 
" What next ?" 

Every week has a new revelation of business 
crime. It is an epidemic. And how many more 
presidents of banks and cashiers of banks are gam- 
bling with other people's money, and how many, bank 
directors are sitting in imbecile silence, letting the 
perfidy go on, a great and patient God only knows. 
My opinion is, that we have nearly touched bottom. 

I think that the last summer was the most valuable 
summer we have had in ten years. The wind has 
been pricked out of the bubble of American specu- 
lation. People who thought that the Judgment Day 
was at least five thousand years off, found it in the 
summer of 1884. This nation has been taught, as 
never before, people had better keep their hands out 
of other people's pockets. Great businesses founded 
on borrowed capital have been obliterated, and men 
who had nothing, lost all they had. 

If you want to take your own money, and put it 
into kites to fly on the commons, or into pipes to 
blow soap-bubbles, you may do so without wronging 
society especially, unless your helpless children are 
tumbled into the poorhouse to be taken care of by 
the public, and they probably will ; but you have no 
right to take the property of others, and turn it into 
kites to fly, and soap-bubbles to blow. 

There is one word that has dragged down more 
people into bankruptcy, and State prison, and perdi- 
tion than any other word in the commercial world, 
and that is the word "borrow." The word is re- 



ar 



ABUSE OF TRUST FUNDS. 



559 



sponsible for nearly all the defalcations and embez- 
zlements, and financial consternations of the last 
four months, and of the last forty. When an exec- 
utor takes money out of a large estate to speculate 
with it, he does not purloin it ; he only ''borrows." 
When a banker makes an overdraft that he may go 
into speculation, he does not commit a theft ; he 
only "borrows." When some man of large financial 
institution, through flaming advertisement in some 
religious paper, or gilt-edged certificate, gets country 
people to put their money into some enterprise for 
carrying on an undeveloped nothing, it is not fraud ; 
he only "borrows." When a young man having easy 
access to a money drawer, or a confidential clerk 
having easy access to the books, takes a certain 
amount of money, and with it makes a Wall Street 
excursion, he is going to put it back, he is going to 
put it all back, he is going to put it back pretty soon ; 
he only "borrows." What is needed is some one 
with giant limb to stand at the curbstone at the foot 
of Trinity Church, and at the head of Wall Street, 
and when that word "borrow" comes bounding along, 
kick it clear to Wall Street Ferry ; and if it strike the 
deck of the ferry-boat and bound clear over to 
Brooklyn Heights and Brooklyn Hill, all the better 
for the City of Churches. Why, when you are going 
to do wrong, pronounce so long a word as the word 
borrow, a word of six letters, when you can get a 
short word, a word more accurate, a word more de- 
scriptive of the reality, a word of five letters — the 
word steal. 

Ah ! my friends, it is high time that people learn 
that it is death to borrow for speculative purposes. 
We all sometimes borrow. We borrow legitimately, 



V 



560 



ABUSE OF TRUST FUNDS. 



and we borrow with the divine favor. Christ, in His 
Sermon on the Mount, enjoined, " From him that 
would borrow of thee, turn not thou away." A 
young man borrows money to get his education ; all 
right. A man purchases property and cannot pay all 
down in cash, and rightly borrows on mortgage. 
There are crises in business when it would be wrong 
not to borrow. Never speculate on borrowed money 
— not a dollar, not a cent, not a farthing. Young 
men, young men, I warn you by your worldly pros- 
pects and the value of your immortal souls, do not do 
it. There are breakers distinguished for their ship- 
wrecks — the Hanways, the Needles, the Caskets, the 
Douvers, the Anderlos, the Skerries — and many a 
craft has gone to pieces on those rocks; but I have to 
tell you that all the Hanways, and the Needles, and 
the Caskets, and the Skerries are as nothing compared 
with the long line of breakers which bound the ocean 
of commercial life north, south, east, and west with 
the white foam of their despair, and the dirge of their 
damnation. 

If I had only a worldly weapon to use on this sub- 
ject I 'would give you the fact fresh from the highest 
authority that ninety per cent, of those who go into 
speculation in Wall Street lose all ; but I have a bet- 
ter warning than a worldly warning. From the 
place where men have perished — body, mind, and 
soul — stand off, stand off! Abstract pulpit discus- 
sion must step aside on this question. Faith and 
repentance are absolutely necessary, but faith and 
repentance are no more doctrines of the Bible than 
commercial integrity. Render to all their dues. 
Owe no man anything. And while I mean to preach 
faith and repentance, more and more to preach them, 



ABUSE OF TRUST FUNDS. 



5 6l 



I do not mean to spend any time in chasing the 
Hittites, and Jebusites, and Gurgushites of Bible 
times, when there are so many evils right around us, 
destroying men and women for time and for eternity. 
The greatest evangelistic preacher the world ever 
saw, a man who died for his evangelism — peerless 
Paul — wrote to the Romans : " Provide things 
honest in the sight of all men ;" wrote to the Co- 
rinthians, " Do that which is honest wrote to the 
Philippians, " Whatsoever things are honest;" wrote 
to the Hebrews, " Willing in all things to live 
honestly." The Bible says that faith without works 
is dead, which being liberally translated, means that 
if your business life does not correspond with your 
profession, your religion is a humbug. 

Here is something that needs to be sounded into 
the ears of all the young men of America, and iter- 
ated, and reiterated ; if this country is ever to be 
delivered from its calamities, and commercial pros- 
perity is to be established and perpetuated, live 
within your means. 

I have the highest commercial authority for saying 
that when the trouble broke out in Wall Street last 
May, there were two hundred and twenty-five million 
dollars in suspense which had already been spent. 
Spend no more than you make. And let us adjust 
all our business, and our homes, by the principles of 
the Christian religion. 

Our religion ought to mean just as much on Sat- 
urday and Monday, as on the day between, and not 
be a mere periphrasis of sanctity. Our religion ought 
to first clean our hearts, and then it ought to clean 
our lives. Religion is not, as some seem to think, a 
sort of church delectation, a kind of confectionery, a 

36 



562 ABUSE OF TRUST FUNDS. 

sort of spiritual caramel, or holy gum drop, or sanc- 
tified peppermint, or theological anaesthetic. It is an 
omnipotent principle, all-controlling, all-conquering. 
You may get along with something less than that, 
and you may deceive yourself with it; but you can- 
not deceive God, and you cannot deceive the world. 
The keen business man will put on his spectacles, and 
he will look clear through to the back of your head, 
and see whether your religion is a fiction, or a fact. 
And you cannot hide your samples of sugar, or rice, 
or tea, or coffee, if they are false ; you cannot hide 
them under the cloth of a communion table. All 
your prayers go for nothing, so long as you misrep- 
resent your banking institution, and in the amount of 
the resources you put down more specie, and more 
fractional currency, and more clearing-house certifi- 
cates, and more legal-tender notes, and more loans, 
and more discounts, than there really are, and when 
you give an account of your liabilities you do not 
mention all the unpaid dividends, and the United 
States bank-notes outstanding, and the individual de- 
posits, and the obligations to other banks and bankers. 
An authority more scrutinizing than that of any 
bank-examiner will go through, and through, and 
through your business. 



CHAPTER LVI. 



WALL STREET DEFALCATION. 

Across the island of New York in 1685 a wall of 
earth and stone was built — a wall cannon mounted to 
keep back the savages. Along this wall ran a street, 
and as the street kept the line of the wall, it was ap- 
propriately called Wall Street. Short, narrow, un- 
architectural, and yet unique in its history, and, 
excepting Lombard Street, London, the mightiest 
street in the world. 

There the United States government was born. 
There Washington held his levees. There Mrs. 
Adams and Mrs. Arnold and Mrs. Caldwell and Mrs. 
Knox and other brilliant women of the Revolution 
displayed their charms. There preached Wither- 
spoon, Jonathan Edwards, and George Whitefield. 
There Dr. John Mason chided Alexander Hamilton 
for writing the Constitution without any God in it. 
There negroes were sold in the slave-mart. The 
criminals were harnessed to wheelbarrows and com- 
pelled to draw burdens. There they were lashed 
through the street behind carts to which they were 
fastened. 

That street has seen the coronation and the burial 
of ten thousand fortunes. The abode of just the op- 
posites — unswerving integrity and tip-top scoundrel- 
ism, Heaven-descended charity and bloodless Shy- 
lockism. The history of Wall street would be the 

563 



564 



WALL STREET DEFALCATION. 



history of the commerce of x\merica. There is no 
more absorbing question in America to-day than this : 
What caused ''Black Wednesday?" What caused 
"Black Friday?" What has caused all the black 
days of financial disaster with which Wall street has 
been connected for the last forty years ? Some say it 
is the credit system. Something back of that. Some 
say it is the spirit of gambling ever and anon be- 
coming epidemic. Something back of that. Some 
say it is the sudden shrinkage in the value of securi- 
ties, which even the most honest and intelligent men 
could not have foreseen. Something back of that. I 
will give you the primal cause of all these disturbances. 
It is the extravagance of modern society which impels 
a man to spend more money than he can honestly 
make, and he goes into Wall street in order to get 
the means for inordinate display ; and sometimes the 
man is to blame, and sometimes his wife, and oftener 
both. Five thousand dollars income, ten thousand 
dollars, twenty thousand dollars income, are not 
enough for a man to keep up the style of living he 
proposes, and therefore he steers his bark toward the 
maelstrom. Other men have suddenly snatched up 
fifty or a hundred thousand dollars — why not he? 
The present income of the man not being large 
enough, he must move earth and hell to catch up with 
his neighbors. Others have a country seat — so must 
he. Others have an extravagant caterer — so must he. 
Others have a palatial residence — so must he. 

Extravagance is the cause of all the defalcations of 
the last forty years, and if you will go through the 
history of all the great panics and the great financial 
disturbances, no sooner have you found the story 
than right back of it you find the story of how many 



WALL STREET DEFALCATION. 



565 



horses the man had, how many carriages the man 
had, how many residences in the country the man 
had, how many banquets the man gave, — always, and 
not one exception, for the last forty years, either 
directly or indirectly, extravagance the cause. 

Now, for the elegances and the refinements and 
the decorations of life I cast my vote. While I 
am considering this subject a basket of flowers is 
handed in — flowers paradisaical in their beauty. 
White calla with a green background of begonia. 
A cluster of heliotropes nestling in some geraniums. 
Sepal and perianth bearing on them the marks of 
God's finger. When I see that basket of flowers 
they persuade me that God loves beauty and adorn- 
ment and decoration. God might have made the 
earth so as to supply the gross demands of sense, but 
left it without adornment or attraction. Instead of 
the variegated colors of the seasons, the earth might 
have worn an unchanging dull brown. The tree 
might have put forth its fruit without the prophecy 
of leaf or blossom. Niagara might have come down 
in gradual descent without thunder-winged spray. 

Look out of your window any morning after there 
has been a dew, and see whether God loves jewels. 
Put a crystal of snow under a microscope, and see 
what God thinks of architecture. God commanded 
the priest of olden time to have his robe adorned 
with a wreath of gold, and the hem of his garment 
to be embroidered in pomegranates. The earth 
sleeps, and God blankets it with the brilliants of the 
night sky. The world wakes, and God washes it 
from the burnished laver of the sunrise. So I have 
not much patience with a man who talks as though 
decoration and adornment and the elegances of life 



566 WALL STREET DEFALCATION. 

are a sin when they are divinely recommended. But 
there is a line to be drawn between adornment and 
decorations that we can afford and those we cannot 
afford, and when a man crosses that line he becomes 
culpable. I cannot tell you what is extravagant for 
you. You cannot tell me what is extravagant for 
me. What is right for a queen may be squandering 
for a duchess. What may be economical for you, a 
man with a larger income, will be wicked waste for 
me, with smaller income. There is no iron rule on 
this subject. Every man before God and on his 
knees must judge what is extravagance, and when a 
man goes into expenditures beyond his means he is 
extravagant. When a man buys anything he cannot 
pay for, he is extravagant. 

There are families in all our cities who can hardly 
pay their rent, and who owe all the merchants in the 
neighborhood, and yet have an apparel unfit for 
their circumstances, and are all the time sailing so 
near shore that business misfortune or an attack of 
sickness prepares them for pauperism. You know 
very well there are thousands of families in our great 
cities who stay in neighborhoods until they have 
exhausted all their capacity to get trusted. They 
stay in the neighborhoods until the druggist will let 
them have no more medicines, and the butcher will 
give them no more meat, and the bakers will give 
them no more bread, and the grocery-men will give 
them no more sugar. Then they find the region 
unhealthy, and they hire a carman, whom they never 
pay, to take them to some new quarters, where the 
merchants, the druggists, the butchers, the bakers, 
and the grocery-men come and give them the best 
rounds of beef and the best sugars and the best mer- 



WALL STREET DEFALCATION. 567 

chandise of all sorts, until they find out that the only 
compensation they are going to get is the acquaint- 
ance of the patrons. There are at least five thou- 
sand such thieves as that in Brooklyn. You see I 
call them by the right name, for if a man buys any- 
thing that he does not mean to pay for, he is a thief. 

Of course, sometimes men are flung of misfortunes 
and they cannot pay. I know men who are just as 
honest in having failed as other men are honest in 
succeeding. I suppose there is hardly a man who 
has gone through life but there have been some times 
when he has been so flung of misfortune he could 
not meet his obligations. But all that I put aside. 
There are a multitude of people who buy that which 
they never intend to pay for, for which there is no 
reasonable expectation they will ever be able to pay. 
Now, why not save the merchant as much as you 
can ? Why not go some day to his store, and when 
nobody is looking, just shoulder the ham or £he spare- 
rib, and in modest silence steal away ? That would 
be less criminal, because in the other way you take 
not only the man's goods, but you take the time of 
the merchant, and the time of his accountant, and 
you take the time of the messenger who brought you 
the goods. Now, if you must steal, steal in a way 
to do as little damage to the trader as possible. 

John Randolph arose in the American Senate when 
a question of national finance was being discussed,- 
and stretching himself to his full height, in a shrill 
voice he cried out : " Mr. Chairman, I have discov- 
ered the philosopher's stone, which turns everything 
into gold : Pay as you go ! " Society has got to be 
reconstructed on this subject, or these times of defal- 
cation will never end. You have no right to ride in 



568 



WALL STREET DEFALCATION. 



a carriage for which you are hopelessly in debt to 
the wheelwright who furnished the landau, and to 
the horse dealer who provided the blooded span, and 
to the harness-maker who caparisoned the gay steeds, 
and to the livery-man who has provided the stabling, 
and to the driver who with resetted hat sits on the 
coach-box. 

Oh, I am so glad it is not the absolute necessities 
of life which send people out into dishonesties and 
fling them into misfortunes. It is almost always 
the superfluities. God has promised us a house, but 
not a palace ; raiment, but not chinchilla ; food, but 
not canvas-back duck. I am yet to see one of these 
great panics, or one of these Wall Street defalcations, 
which is not connected in some way with extrav- 
agance. 

Extravagance accounts for the disturbance of na- 
tional finances. Aggregations are made up of units, 
and when.one-half of the people of this country owe 
the other half, how can we expect financial pros- 
perity ? Every four years we get a great spasm of 
virtue, and when a President is to be elected we say, 
" Now, down with the old administration, and let us 
have another Secretary of the Treasury, and let us 
have a new deal of things, and then we will get over 
all our perturbation." I do not care who is President, 
or who is Secretary of the Treasury, or how much 
breadstuffs go out of the country, or how much 
gold is imported, until we learn to pay our debts, and 
it becomes a general theory in this country that men 
must buy no more than they can pay for — until that 
time comes there will be no permanent prosperity. 
Look at the pernicious extravagance : Take the one 
fact that New York every year pays two million dol- 



WALL STREET DEFALCATION. 



569 



lars for theatrical amusements. While once in a 
while a Henry Irving or an Edwin Booth or a Joseph 
Jefferson thrills a great audience with tragedy, you 
know as well as I do that the vast majority of the 
theaters of New York are as debased, as debased they 
can be, as unclean, as unclean they can be, and as 
damnable, as damnable they can be. Two million 
dollars — the vast majority of those dollars going up 
in a wrong direction. 

Ninety-five millions paid in this country for cigars 
and tobacco a year. One thousand five hundred mil- 
lion dollars paid for strong drink in one year in this 
country. With such extravagance, pernicious ex- 
travagance, can there be any permanent prosperity ? 
Business men, cool-headed business men, is such a 
thing a possibility? One thousand five hundred mil- 
lion dollars for rum. These extravagances also ac- 
count, as I have already hinted, for the positive 
crimes, the forgeries, the absconding of the officers 
of the banks. The store on Broadway and the office 
on Wall Street swamped by the residence on Madi- 
son Square. The father's, the husband's craft cap- 
sized by carrying too much domestic sail. That is 
what springs the leak in the merchant's money till. 
That is what cracks the pistols of the suicides. That 
is what tears down Marine Bank. That is what 
stops insurance companies. That is what halts this 
nation again and again in its triumphal march of 
prosperity. In the presence of this audience to-day, 
and the American people so far as I can get their 
attention, I want to arraign this monster curse of ex- 
travagance, and I want you to pelt it with your scorn 
and hurl at it yonr anathema. 

Look at the one fact that it is a matter of solid sta- 



570 WALL STREET DEFALCATION. 

tistics, that in this country, in the cities of New York 
and Brooklyn — I will narrow it down — in the cities 
of New York and Brooklyn, it is estimated that there 
are now over five thousand women whose apparel 
costs them over two thousand dollars a year each. 
Things have got to such a pass that when we cry 
over our sins in church, we wipe the tears away 
with a hundred-and-fifty-dollar pocket-handkerchief ! 

Extravagance accounts for much of the pauperism. 
Who are these people whom you have to help ? 
Many of them are the children of parents who had 
plenty, lived in luxury, had more than they needed, 
spent all they had, spent more, too, then died, and left 
their families in poverty, Some of those who call 
on you now for aid had an ancestry that supped on 
Burgundy and woodcock. I could name a score of 
men who have every luxury. They smoke the best 
cigars, and they drink the finest wines, and they have 
the grandest surroundings, and when they die their 
families will go on the cold charity of the world. 
Now, the death of such a man is a grand larceny. 
He swindles the world as he goes into his coffin, and 
he deserves to have his bones sold to the medical 
museum for anatomical specimens, the proceeds to 
furnish bread for his children. 

I know it cuts close. Some of you make a great 
swash in life, and after awhile you will die, and min- 
isters will be sent for to come and stand by your 
coffin and lie about your excellences ; but they will 
not come. If you send for me, I will tell you what 
my text will be : " He that provideth not for his own, 
and especially for those of his own household, is 
worse than an infidel." And yet we find Christian 
men, men of large means, who sometimes talk elo- 



WALL STREET DEFALCATION. 57 1 

quently about the Christian Church and about 
civilization, expending everything on themselves and 
nothing on the cause of God, and they crack the 
back of their Palais Royal glove in trying to hide 
the one cent they put in the Lord's treasury. What 
an apportionment ! Twenty thousand dollars for 
ourselves, and one cent for God. Ah ! my friends, 
this extravagance accounts for a great deal of what 
the cause of God suffers. 

And the desecration goes on, even to the funeral 
day. You know very well that there are men who 
die solvent, but the expenses are so great before they 
get under ground they are insolvent. There are 
families that go into penury in wicked response to 
the demands of this day. They put in casket and 
tombstone that which they ought to put in bread. 
They wanted bread, you give them a tombstone. 

One would think that the last two obligations peo- 
ple would be particular about would be to the physi- 
cian and the undertaker. Because they are the two 
last obligations, those two professions are almost al- 
ways cheated. They send for the doctor in great 
haste, and he must come day and night. They send 
for the undertaker amid the great solemnities, and 
often these two men are the very last to be met with 
compensation. Merchants sell goods, and the goods 
are not paid for ; they take back the goods, I am told. 
But there is no relief in this case. The man spent all 
he had in luxuries and extravagance while he lived, 
and then he goes out of the world, and has left noth- 
ing for his family, nothing for the obsequies, and as 
he goes out of the world he steals the doctor's pills 
and the undertaker's slippers. 

And then look how the cause of God is impover- 
ished. Men give so much sometimes for their indul- 



572 WALL STREET DEFALCATION. 

gences they have nothing for the cause of God and 
religion. Twenty-two million dollars expended in 
this country a year for religious purposes ; but what 
are the twenty-two millions expended for religion 
compared with the ninety-five millions expended on 
cigars and tobacco, and then one thousand, five hun- 
dred millions of dollars spent for rum, accursed rum? 
So a man who had a fortune of seven hundred and 
fifty thousand dollars, or what amounted to that, in 
London, spent it all in indulgences, chiefly in glut- 
tonies, and sent hither and yon for all the delicacies, 
and often had a meal that would cost one or two 
hundred dollars for himself. Then he was reduced 
to one guinea, with which he bought a rare bird, 
had it cooked in best style, ate it, took two hours for 
digestion, walked out on Westminster Bridge, and 
jumped into the Thames. On a large scale what men 
are doing on a small scale. 

Oh, my friends, let us take our stand against the 
extravagances of society. Do not pay for things 
which are frivolous when you may lack the necessi- 
ties. Do not put one month's wages or salary into a 
trinket, just one trinket. 

Keep your credit good by seldom asking for any. 
Pay ! Do not starve a whole year to afford one Bel- 
shazzar's carnival. Do not buy a coat of many 
colors, and then in six months be out at the elbows. 
Flourish not, as some people I have known, who took 
apartments at a fashionable hotel, and had elegant 
drawing rooms attached, and then vanished in the 
night, not even leaving their compliments for the 
landlord. I tell you, my friends, in the day of God's 
judgment, we will not only have to give an account 
for the way we made our money, but for the way we 
spent it. 



PART IV. 

(Joalg for 1 the national Arena. 




CHAPTER LVII. 



NATIONAL RUIN. 

On cisatlantic shores a company of American • 
scientists are now landing, on their way to find the 
tomb of a dead empire holding in its arms a dead 
city, mother and child of the same name — Babylon. 
The ancient mounds will invite the spades and 
shovels and crowbars, while the unwashed natives 
look on in surprise. Our scientific friends will find 
yellow bricks still impressed with the name of 
Nebuchadnezzar, and they will go down into the 
sarcophagus of a monarchy buried more than two 
thousand years ago. May the explorations of Raw- 
linson and Layard and Chevalier and Opperto and 
Loftus and Chesney be eclipsed by the present arch- 
aeological uncovering. 

But is it possible this is all that remains of Babylon ? 
a city once five times larger than London and twelve 
times larger than New York? Walls three hundred 
and seventy-three feet high and ninety-three feet 
thick. Twenty-five burnished gates on each side, 
with streets running clear through to corresponding 
gates on the other side. Six hundred and twenty- 
five squares. More pomp and wealth and splendor 
and sin than could be found in any five modern cities 
combined. A city of palaces and temples. A city 
having within it a garden on an artificial hill four 
hundred feet high, the sides of the mountain terraced. 

575 



576 



NATIONAL RUIN. 



All this built to keep the king's wife, Amyitis, from 
becoming homesick for the mountainous region in 
which she spent her girlhood. The waters of the 
Euphrates spouted up to irrigate this great altitude 
into fruits and flowers and arborescence unimagin- 
able. A great river running from north to south 
clear through the city, bridges over it, tunnels under 
it, boats on it. 

A city of bazars and of market-places, unrivaled for 
aromatics, and unguents, and high-mettled horses 
with grooms by their side, and thyme wood, and 
African evergreens, and Egyptian linen, and all 
styles of costly textile fabric, and rarest purples 
extracted from shell-fish on the Mediterranean coast, 
and rarest scarlets taken from brilliant insects in 
Spain, and ivories brought from successful elephan- 
tine hunts in India, and diamonds whose flash was a 
repartee to the sun. Fortress within fortress, embat- 
tlement rising above embattlement. Great capital of 
the ages. But one night, while honest citizens were 
asleep, but all the saloons of saturnalia were in full 
blast, and at the king's castle they had filled the 
tankards for the tenth time, and reeling, and guff- 
awing, and hiccoughing, around the state table were 
the rulers of the land, General Cyrus ordered his 
besieging army to take shovels and spades, and they 
diverted the river from its usual channel into another 
direction, so that the forsaken bed of the river 
became the path on which the besieging army en- 
tered. When the morning dawned the conquerors 
were inside the outside trenches. Babylon had 
fallen. 

"Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty 
city, for in one hour is thy judgment come." But do 



NATIONAL RUIN. 



577 



nations die ? Oh, yes, there is great mortality 
among monarchies and republics. They are like 
individuals in the fact that they are born, they have a 
middle life, they have a decease : they have a cradle, 
and a grave. Some of them are assassinated, some 
destroyed by their own hand. Let me call the roll of 
some of the dead civilizations, and some of the dead 
cities, and let some one answer for them. 

Egyptian civilization, stand up. " Dead ! " answer 
the ruins of Karnak and Luxor, and from seventy 
pyramids on the east side of the Nile there comes up 
a great chorus, crying : " Dead, dead ! " Assyrian 
Empire, stand up and answer. " Dead ! " cry the 
charred ruins of Nineveh. After six hundred years 
of magnificent opportunity, dead. Israelitish King- 
dom, stand up. After two hundred and fifty years 
of divine interposition and of miraculous vicissitude, 
and of heroic behavior and of appalling depravity. 
Dead ! Phoenicia, stand up and answer. After in. 
venting the alphabet and giving it to the world, and 
sending out her merchant caravans in one direction 
to Central Asia, and sending out her navigators to the 
Atlantic Ocean in another direction. Dead ! Pillars 
of Hercules and rocks on which the Tyrian fishermen 
dried their nets, all answer, " Dead Phoenicia." 
Athens, after Phidias, after Demosthenes, after Mil- 
tiades. Dead ! Sparta, after Leonidas, after Eury- 
biades, after Salamis, after Thermopylae.. Dead ! 
Roman Empire, stand up and answer. Empire once 
bounded by the British Channel on the north, by the 
Euphrates on the east, by the great Sahara Desert in 
Africa on the south, by the Atlantic Ocean on the 
west. Home of three great civilizations, owning all 
the then discovered world worth owning. Roman 

37 



578 NATIONAL RUIN. 

Empire, answer. Gibbon, in his " Rise and Fall of 
the Roman Empire," says " Dead! " and the forsaken 
seats ol the ruined Coliseum, and the skeleton of the 
aqueducts, and the miasma of the Campagna, and 
the fragments of the marble baths, and the useless 
piers of the Bridge Triumphalis, and the Mamartine 
prison, holding no more apostolic prisoners, and the 
silent Forum, and Basilica of Constantine, and the 
arch of Titus, and the Pantheon, come in with great 
chorus, crying : " Dead, dead ! " After Horace, after 
Virgil, after Tacitus, after Cicero, dead. After Hora- 
tius on the bridge, and Cincinnatus, the farmer 
oligarch, after Pompey, after Scipio, after Cassius, 
after Constantine, after Csesar. Dead ! The war eagle 
of Rome flew so high it was blinded by the sun and 
came whirling down through the heavens, and the 
owl of desolation and darkness built its nest in the 
forsaken eyrie. Mexican Empire. Dead ! French Em- 
pire. Dead ! 

You see, my friends, it is no unusual thing for a 
government to perish, and in the same necrology of 
dead nations, and in the same graveyard of expired 
governments will go the United States of America 
unless there be some potent voice to call a halt, and 
unless God in His me^rcy interfere, and through a 
purified ballot-box and a widespread public Christian 
sentiment the catastrophe be averted. I propose to 
set before you the evils that threaten to destroy the 
American Government, and to annihilate American 
institutions. 

The first evil that threatens the annihilation of our 
American institutions is the fact that political bribery, 
which once was considered a crime, has by many 
come to be considered a tolerable virtue. 



NATIONAL RUIN. 579 

There is a legitimate use of money in elections, in 
the printing of political tracts, and in the hiring of 
public halls, and in the obtaining of campaign oratory. 
Hundreds and thousands of men will have set before 
them so much money for a Republican vote, and so 
much money for a Democratic vote, and the superior 
financial inducement will decide the action. 

Unless this purchase and sale of suffrage shall 
cease, the American Government will expire, and 
you might as well be getting ready the monument 
for another dead nation. My friends, if you have 
not noticed that political bribery is one of the ghastly 
crimes of this day, you have not kept your eyes 
open. 

Another evil threatening the destruction of Amer- 
ican institutions is the solidifying of the sections 
against each other. A solid North. A solid South. 
If this goes on we shall, after a while, have a solid 
East against a solid West, we shall have solid Middle 
States against solid Northern States, we shall have a 
solid New York against a solid Pennsylvania, and a 
solid Ohio against a solid Kentucky. 

When Garfield died, and all the States gathered 
around his casket in sympathy and in tears, and as 
hearty telegrams of condolence came from New Or- 
leans and from Charleston as from Boston and Chi- 
cago, I said to myself: " I think sectionalism is 
dead." But alas! no. The difficulty will never be 
ended until each State of the nation is split up into 
two or three great political parties. This country 
cannot exist, unless it exists as one body, the national 
capital, the heart, sending out through all the arteries 
of communication warmth and life to the very ex- 
tremities. This nation cannot exist unless it exists as 



580 NATIONAL RUIN. 

one family, and you might as well have solid brothers 
against solid sisters, and a solid bread-tray against a 
solid cradle, and a solid nursery against a solid dining- 
room ; and you might as well have solid ears against 
solid eyes, and solid head against solid foot. What 
is the interest of Georgia is the interest of Massachu- 
setts ; what is the interest of New York is the interest 
of South Carolina. Does the Ohio River change its 
politics when it gets below Louisville ? It is not 
possible for these sectional antagonisms to continue 
for a great many years without permanent compound 
fracture. 

Another evil threatening the destruction of our 
American institutions is the low state of public 
morals. 

What killed Babylon? What killed Phoenicia? 
What killed Rome? Their own depravity; and the 
fraud and the drunkenness and the lechery which 
have destroyed other nations will destroy ours unless 
a merciful God prevent. 

I have to tell you what you know already, that 
American politics have sunken to such a low depth 
that there is nothing beneath. What we see in some 
directions we see in nearly all directions. The pecu- 
lation and the knavery hurled to the surface by the 
explosion of banks and business firms are only speci- 
mens of great Cotopaxis and Strombolis of wicked- 
ness that boil and roar and surge beneath, but have 
not }^et regurgitated to the surface. When the 
heaven-descended Democratic party enacted the 
Tweed rascality it seemed to eclipse everything ; but 
after awhile the heaven-descended Republican party 
outwitted Pandemonium with the Star Route infamy. 

My friends, we have in this country, people who 



NATIONAL RUIN. 



5 8l 



say the marriage institution amounts to nothing. 
They scoff at it. We have people walking in polite 
parlors in our day who are not good enough to be 
scavengers in Sodom ! I went over to San Francisco 
four or five years ago — that beautiful city, that 
Queen of the Pacific. May the blessing of God 
come down upon her great churches, and her noble 
men and women ! When I got into the city of San 
Francisco, the mayor of the city, and the president of 
the Board of Health called on me and insisted that I 
go and see the Chinese quarters, no doubt, so that on 
my return to the Atlantic coast I might tell what 
dreadful people the Chinese are. But on the last 
night of my stay in San Francisco, before thousands 
of people in their great opera house, I said : "Would 
you like me to tell you just what I think, plainly and 
honestly?" They said; "Yes, yes, yes!" I said: 
"Do you think you can stand it all ?" They said : 
"Yes, yes, yes!" "Then," I said, "my opinion is that 
the curse of San Francisco is not your Chinese quar- 
ters, but your millionaire libertines !" 

And two of them sat right before me — Felix and 
Drusilla. And so it is in all the cities. I never swear, 
but when I see a man go unwhipt of justice, laughing 
over his shame, and calling his damnable deeds gal- 
lantry and peccadillo, I am tempted to hurl red-hot 
anathema, and to conclude that if, according to some 
people's theology, there is no hell, there ought to be ! 

There is enough out-and-out licentiousness in Amer- 
ican cities to-day to bring down upon them the wrath 
of that God who, on the 24th of August, 79, buried 
Herculaneum and Pompeii so deep in ashes that the 
eighteen hundred and five subsequent years have not 
been able to complete the exhumation. There are in 



582 



NATIONAL RUIN. 



American cities to-day whole blocks of houses which 
the police know to be infamous, and yet by purchase 
they are silenced, by hush money, so that such places 
are as much under the defence of government as 
public libraries and asylums of mercy. These ulcers 
on the body politic bleed and gangrene away the life 
of the nation, and public authority in many of the 
cities looks the other way. You can not cure such 
wounds as these with a silken bandage. You will 
have to cure them by putting deep in the lancet of 
moral surgery and burning them out with the caustic 
of holy wrath, and with most decisive amputation 
cutting off the scabrous and putrefying abominations. 
As the Romans were after the Celts, and as the Nor- 
mans were after the Britons, so there are evils after 
this nation which will attend its obsequies unless we 
first attend theirs. 

Superstition tells of a marine reptile, the cepha- 
loptera, which enfolded and crushed a ship of war ; 
but it is no superstition when I tell you that the his- 
tory of many of the dead nations proclaim to us the 
fact that our ship of state is in danger of being 
crushed by the cephaloptera of national depravity. 
Where is the Hercules to slay this hydra? Is it not 
time to speak by pen, by tongue, by ballot-box, by 
the rolling of the prison door, by hangman's halter, 
by earnest prayer, by Sinaitic detonation? 

A son of King Cresus is said to have been dumb, 
and to have never uttered a word until he saw 
his father being put to death. Then he broke the 
shackles of silence, and cried out: " Kill not my 
father, Cresus ! " When I see the cheatery and the 
wantonness and the manifold crime of this country 
attempting to commit patricide — yea, matricide upon 



NATIONAL RUIN. 



583 



our institutions, it seems to me that lips that hereto- 
fore have been dumb ought to break the silence with 
canerous tones of fiery protest. 

I shall go on until I have shown you the way in 
which we may save the life of the nation. 

I want to put all the matter before you, so that 
everv honest man and woman will know just how 
matters stand, and what they ought to do if they 
vote, and what they ought to do if they pray. This 
Nation is not going to perish. Alexander, when he » 
heard of the wealth of the Indies, divided Macedonia 
among his soldiers. Some one asked him what he had 
kept for himself, and he replied : " I am keeping 
hope. And that jewel I keep bright and shining in 
my soul, whatever else I shall surrender." Hope, 
then, in God. He will set back these oceanic tides 
of moral devastation. Do you know what is the 
prize for which contention is made to-day ? It is the 
prize of this continent. Never since, according to 
John Milton, when " Satan was hurled headlong 
flaming from the ethereal skies in hideous ruin and 
combustion down," have the powers of darkness been 
so determined to win this continent as they are now. 

What a jewel it is — a jewel carved in relief, the 
cameo of this planet ! On one side of us the Atlantic 
Ocean, dividing us from the worn-out governments 
of Europe. On the other side the Pacific Ocean, 
dividing us from the superstitions of Asia. On the 
north of us the Arctic Sea, which is the gymnasium 
in which the explorers and navigators develop their 
courage. A continent 10,500 miles long, 17,000,000 
square miles, and all of it but about one-seventh capa- 
ble of rich cultivation. One hundred millions of popu- 
lation on this continent of North and South America 



58 4 



NATIONAL RUIN. 



— one hundred millions, and room for many hundred 
millions more. All flora and all fauna, all metals and 
all precious woods, and all grains and all fruits. The 
Appalachian range the backbone and the rivers of 
the ganglia carrying life all through and out to the 
extremities. Isthmus of Darien the narrow waist of 
a giant continent, all to be under one government, 
and all free and all Christian, and the scene of Christ's 
personal reign on earth if, according to the expecta- 
• tion of many good people, He shall at last set up His 
throne in this world. 

Who shall have this hemisphere ? Christ or Satan ? 
Who shall have the shore of her inland seas, the silver 
of her Nevadas, the gold of her Colorados, the teles- 
copes of her observatories, the brain of her univer- 
sities, the wheat of her prairies, the rice of her 
savannas, the two great ocean beaches — the one 
reaching from Baffin's Bay to Terra del Fuego, and 
the other from Behring Straits to Cape Horn — and 
all the moral, and temporal, and spiritual, and ever- 
lasting interests of a population vast beyond all com- 
putation save by Him, with whom a thousand years 
areas one day? Who shall have the hemisphere? 
You and I will decide that or help to decide it, by 
conscientious vote, by earnest prayer, by maintenance 
of Christian institutions, by support of great philan- 
thropies, by putting body, mind, and soul on the 
right side of ail moral, religious, and national move- 
ments. 



THE RETURN FROM THE CHRISTENING. 

[After L. Kaemmerer.] 



CHAPTER LVIII. 



EASY DIVORCE. 

That there are hundreds and thousands of infeli- 
citous homes in America"*? no one will doubt. If there 
were only one skeleton in the closet, that might be 
locked up and abandoned ; but in many a home there 
is a skeleton in the hallway and a skeleton in all the 
apartments. 

" Unhappily married " are two words descriptive 
of many a homestead. It needs no orthodox minister 
to prove 1 to a badly mated pair that there is a hell ; 
they are there now. 

Some say that for the alleviation of all these do- 
mestic disorders of which we hear, easy divorce is a 
good prescription. God sometimes authorizes di- 
vorce as certainly as He authorizes marriage. I have 
just as much regard for one lawfully divorced as I 
. have for one lawfully married. But you know, and 
I know, that wholesale divorce is one of our national 
scourges. I am not surprised at this when I think of 
the influences which have been abroad militating 
against the marriage relation. 

For many years the platforms of the country rang 
with talk about a free-love millennium. There were 
t meetings of this kind held in the Academy of Music, 
Brooklyn; Cooper Institute, New York; Tremont 
Temple, Boston, and all over the land. Some of the 
women who were most prominent in that movement 

587 



588 



EASY DIVORCE. 



have since been distinguished for great promiscuosity 
of affection. Popular themes for such occasions were 
the tyranny of man, the oppression of the marriage 
relation, women's rights, and the affinities. Promi- 
nent speakers were women with short curls, and 
short dress, and very long tongue, everlastingly at 
war with God because they were created women ; 
while on the platform sat meek men with soft accent, 
and cowed demeanor, apologetic for masculinity, and 
holding the parasols while the termagant orators 
went on preaching the gospel of free-love. 
# That campaign of about twenty years set more 
devils into the marriage relation than w T ill be exor- 
cised in the next fifty. Men and women went home 
from such meetings so permanently confused as to 
who were their wives and husbands, that they never 
got out of their perplexity, and the criminal and the 
civil courts tried to disentangle the Iliad of woes, 
and this one got alimony, and that one got a limited 
divorce, and this mother kept the children on con- 
dition that the father could sometimes come and 
look at them, and these went into the poorhouses, 
and those went into an insane asylum, and those 
went into dissolute public life, and all went to de- 
struction. The mightiest war ever made against the 
marriage institution was that free-love campaign, 
sometimes under one name, and sometimes under 
another. 

Another influence that has warred upon the mar- 
riage relation has been polygamy in Utah. That is 
a stereotyped caricature of the marriage relation, 
and has poisoned the whole land. You might as 
well think that you can have an arm in a state of 
mortification and yet the whole body not be sickened, 



EASY DIVORCE. 



5 3 9 



as to have those Territories polygamized and yet the 
body of the nation not feel the putrefaction. Hear 
it, good men and women of America, that so long' 
ago as 1862 a law was passed by Congress forbid- 
ding polygamy in the Territories and in all the places 
where they had jurisdiction. Armed with all the 
power of government, and having an army at their 
disposal, and yet the first .brick has not been knocked 
from that fortress of libertinism. 

Every new President in his inaugural has tickled 
that monster with the straw of condemnation, and 
every Congress has stultified itself in proposing some 
plan that would not work. Polygamy stands in 
Utah and in other of the Territories to-day more 
entrenched, and more brazen, and more puissant, and 
more braggart, and more infernal, than at any time 
in its history. James Buchanan, a much-abused man 
of his day, did more for the extirpation of this vil- 
lany than all the subsequent administrations have 
dared to do. Mr. Buchanan sent out an army, and 
although it was halted in its work, still he accom- 
plished more than the subsequent administrations, 
which have done nothing but talk, talk, talk. 

I want the people of America to know that for 
twenty-two years we have had a positive law pro- 
hibiting polygamy in the Territories. People are cry- 
ing out for some new law, as though we had not an 
old law already with which that infamy could be 
swept into the perdition from which it smoked up. 
Polygamy in Utah has warred against the marriage 
relation throughout the land. It is impossible to 
have such an awful sewer of iniquity sending up its 
miasma, which is wafted by the winds north, south, 
east and west, without the whole land being affected 
by it. 



590 EASY DIVORCE. 

Another influence that has warred against the 
marriage relation in this country has been a pustu- 
lous literature, with its millions of sheets every week 
choked with stories of domestic wrongs, and infidel- 
ities, and massacres, and outrages, until it is a wonder 
to me that there are any decencies or any common 
sense left on the subject of marriage. One-half of 
the news-stands of Brooklyn and New York and all 
our cities reeking with the filth. 

" Now," say some, " we admit all these evils, and 
the only way to clear them out or correct them is by 
easy divorce." Well, before we yield to that cry, let 
us find out how easy it is now. 

I have looked over the laws of all the States, and 
I find that while in some States it is easier than in 
others, in every State it is easy. The State of Illinois 
through its Legislature recites a long list of proper 
causes for divorce, and then closes up by giving to 
the courts the right to make a decree of divorce in 
any case where they deem it expedient. After that 
you are not surprised at the announcement that in 
one county of the State of Illinois, in one year, there 
were 833 divorces. If you want to know how easy 
it is you have only to look over the records of the 
States. In Massachusetts 600 divorces in one year ; 
in Maine 478 in one year ; in Connecticut 401 divorces 
in one year; in the city of San Francisco 333 
divorces in 1880; in New England in one year 21 13 
divorces, and in twenty years in New England 
twenty thousand. Is that not easy enough ? 

I want you to notice that frequency of divorce al- 
ways goes along with the dissoluteness of society. 
Rome for five hundred years had not one case of 
divorce. Those were her days of glory and virtue. 



EASY DIVORCE. 



591 



Then the reign of vice began, and divorce became 
epidemic. If you want . to know how rapidly the 
Empire went down, ask Gibbon. Do you know how 
the Reign of Terror w T as introduced in France ? By 
20,000 cases of divorce in one year in Paris. What 
we want in this country, and in all lands, is that di- 
vorce be made more, and more, and more difficult. 
Then people before they enter that relation will be 
persuaded that there will probably be no escape from 
it, except through the door of the sepulchre. Then 
they will pause on the verge of that relation, until 
they are fully satisfied that it is best, and that it is 
right, and that it is happiest. Then we shall have no 
more marriage in fun. Then men and women will 
not enter the relation with the idea it is only a trial 
trip, and if they do not like it they can get out at the 
first landing. Then this whole question will be taken 
out of the frivolous into the tremendous, and there 
will be no more joking about the blossoms in a bride's 
hair than about the cypress on a coffin. 

What we want is that the Congress of the United 
States move for the changing the national Constitu- 
tion so that a law can be passed which shall be uni- 
form all over the country, and what shall be right in 
one State shall be right in all the States, and what is 
wrong in one State will be wrong in all the States. 

How is it now ? If a party in the marriage rela- 
tion gets dissatisfied, it is only necessary to move to 
another State to achieve liberation from the domestic 
tie, and divorce is effected so easy that the first one 
party knows of it is by seeing it in the newspaper 
that Rev. Dr. Somebody on April 14, 1884, intro- 
duced into a new marriage relation a member of the 
household who went off on a pleasure excursion to 



592 EASY DIVORCE. 

Newport, or a business excursion to Chicago. Mar- 
ried at the bride's house. No cards. There are 
States of the Union which practically put a premium 
upon the disintegration of the marriage relation, 
while there are other States, like our own New York 
State, that has the pre-eminent idiocy of making 
marriage lawful at twelve and fourteen years of age. 

The Congress of the United States needs to move 
for a change of the national Constitution, and then to 
appoint a committee —not made up of single gentle- 
men, but of men of families, and their families in 
Washington — who shall prepare a good, honest, 
righteous, comprehensive, uniform law that will con- 
trol everything from Sandy Hook to Golden Horn. 
That will put an end to brokerages in marriage. 
That will send divorce lawyers into a decent busi- 
ness. That will set people agitated for many years 
on the question of how shall they get away from 
each other, to planning how they can adjust them- 
selves to the more or less unfavorable circumstances. 

More difficult divorce will put an estoppal to a 
great extent upon marriage as a financial speculation. 
There are men who go into the relation just as they 
go into Wall Street to purchase shares. The female 
to be invited into the partnership of wedlock is 
utterly unattractive, and in disposition a suppressed 
Vesuvius. Everybody knows it, but this masculine 
candidate for matrimonial orders, through the com- 
mercial agency or through the county records, finds 
out how much estate is to be inherited, and he calcu- 
lates it. He thinks out how long it will be before 
the old man will die, and whether he can stand the 
refractory temper until he does die, and then he 
enters the relation ; for he says, " If I cannot stand it, 



EASY DIVORCE. 



593 



then through the divorce law I'll back out." That 
process is going on all the time, and men enter the 
relation without any moral principle, without any 
affection, and it is as much a matter of stock specu- 
lation as anything that transpired yesterday in Union 
Pacific, Wabash and Delaware and Lackawanna. 

Now, suppose a man understood, as he ought to 
understand, that if he goes into that relation there is 
no possibility of his getting out, or no probability, 
he would be more slow to put his neck in the yoke. 
He should say to himself, "Rather than a Caribbean 
whirlwind with a whole fleet of shipping in its arms, 
give me a zephyr off fields of sunshine and gardens 
of peace." 

Rigorous divorce law will also hinder women 
from the fatal mistake of marrying men to reform 
them. If a young man by twenty-five years of age, 
or thirty years of age have the habit of strong drink 
fixed on him, he is as certainly bound for a drunk- 
ard's grave as that train starting out from Grand 
Central Depot at 8 o'clock to-morrow morning is 
bound for Albany. The train may not reach Albany, 
for it may be thrown from the track. The young 
man may not reach a drunkard's grave, for some- 
thing may throw him off the iron track of evil habit ; 
but the probability is that the train that starts to- 
morrow morning at 8 o'clock for Albany will get 
there, and the probability is that the young man who 
has the habit of strong drink fixed on him before 
twenty-five or thirty years of age will arrive at a 
drunkard's grave. She knows he drinks, although 
he tries to hide it by chewing cloves. Everybody 
knows he drinks. Parents warn, neighbors and 
friends warn. She will marry him, she will reform 
him. 



594 



EASY DIVORCE. 



If she is unsuccessful in the experiment, why then 
the divorce law will emancipate her, because" habitual 
drunkenness is a cause for divorce in Indiana, Ken- 
tucky, Florida, Connecticut, and nearly all the States. 
So the poor thing goes to the altar of sacrifice. If 
you will show me the poverty-struck streets in any 
city, I will show you the homes of the women who 
married men to reform them. In one case out of ten 
thousand it may be a successful experiment. I never 
saw the successful experiment. But have a rigorous 
divorce law, and that woman will say, " If I am affi- 
anced to that man, it is for life ; and if now in the 
ardor of his young love, and I am the prize to be 
won, he will not give up his cups, when he has won 
the prize, surely he will not give up his cups." And 
so that woman will say to the man, " No, sir, you are 
already married to the club, and you are married to 
that evil habit, and so you are married twice, and 
you are a bigamist. Go ! " 

A rigorous divorce law will also do much to hinder 
hasty and inconsiderate marriages. Under the im- 
pression that one can be easily released people enter 
the relation without inquiry, and without reflection. 
Romance and impulse rule the day. Perhaps the 
only ground for the marriage compact is that she 
likes his looks, and he admires the graceful way she 
passes around the ice-cream at the picnic ! It is all 
they know about each other. It is all the preparation 
for life. A man, not able to pay his own board bill, 
with not a dollar in his possession, will stand at the 
altar and take the loving hand, and say, " With all 
my worldly goods I thee endow !" A woman that 
could not make a loaf of bread to save her life, will 
swear to cherish and obey. A Christian will marry 



EASY DIVORCE. 



595 



an atheist, and that always makes conjoined wretch- 
edness ; for if a man does not believe there is a God 
he is neither to be trusted with a dollar, nor with 
your life-long- happiness. 

Having read much about love in a cottage people 
brought up in ease will go and starve in a hovel. 
Runaway matches and elopements, 999 out of 1000 
of which mean death and hell, multiplying on all 
hands. You see them in every day's newspapers. 
Our ministers in this region have no defence such as 
they have in other cities where the banns must be 
previously published and an officer of the law must 
give a certificate that all is right ; so clergymen are 
left defenceless, and unite those who ought never to be 
united. Perhaps they are too young or perhaps they 
are standing already in some domestic compact. 

By the wreck of ten thousand homes, by the 
holocaust of ten thousand sacrificed men and women, 
by the hearthstone of the family which is the corner- 
stone of the State, and in the name of that God who 
hath set up the family institution and who hath made 
the breaking of the marital oath the most appalling- 
of all perjuries, I implore the Congress of the United 
States to make some righteous, uniform law for all 
the States, and from ocean to ocean, on this subject 
of marriage and divorce. 

And, fellow-citizens, as well as fellow-Christians, let 
us have a divine rage against anything that wars on 
the marriage state. Blessed institution ! Instead of 
two arms to fight the battle of life, four. Instead of 
two eyes to scrutinize the path of life, four. Instead 
of two shoulders to lift the burden of life, four. 
Twice tfee energy, twice the courage, twice the holy 
ambition, twice the probability of worldly success, 



596 EASY DIVORCE. 

twice the prospects of heaven. Into that matrimonial 
bower God fetches two souls. Outside the bower 
room for all contentions, and all bickerings, and all 
controversies, but inside that bower there is room for 
only one guest — the angel of love. Let that angel 
stand at the floral doorway of this Edenic bower 
with drawn sword to hew down the worst foe of that 
bower — easy divorce. And for every Paradise lost 
may there be a Paradise regained. And after we 
quit our home here may we have a brighter home in 
heaven, at the windows of which this moment are 
familiar faces watching for our arrival, and won- 
dering why so long we tarry. 




POVERTY. 

[After A. Trentin.] 



CHAPTER LIX. 



THE ARCH-FIEND OF THE NATIONS. 

Noah did the best and the worst thing- for the 
world. He built an ark against the deluge of water, 
but introduced a deluge against which the human 
race has ever since been trying to build an ark — the 
deluge of drunkenness. In the opening chapters of 
the Bible we hear his staggering steps. Shem and 
Japhet tried to cover up the disgrace, but there he is, 
drunk on wine at a time in the history of the world 
when, to say the least, there was no lack of water. 

Inebriation having entered the world, has not re- 
treated. Abigail, the fair and heroic wife who saved 
the flocks of Nabal, her husband, from confiscation 
by invaders, goes home at night and finds him so in- 
toxicated she can* not tell him the story of his narrow 
escape. Uriah came to see David, and David got 
him drunk, and paved the way for the despoliation of 
a household. Even the church bishops needed to be 
charged to be sober and not given to too much wine ; 
and so familiar were the people of Bible times with 
the staggering and falling motion of the inebriate, 
that Isaiah, when he comes to describe the final dis- 
location of worlds, says : " The earth shall reel to and 
fro like a drunkard." 

Ever since apples and grapes and wheat grew the 
world has been tempted to unhealthful stimulants. 
But the intoxicants of the olden time were an inno- 

599 



600 THE ARCH-FIEND OF THE NATIONS. 



cent beverage, a harmless orangeade, a quiet syrup, 
a peaceful soda water, as compared with the liquids 
of modern inebriation, into wmich a madness, and a 
fury, and a gloom, and a fire, and a suicide, and a 
retribution have mixed and mingled. Fermentation 
was always known, but it was not until a thousand 
years after Christ that distillation was invented. 

While we must confess that some of the ancient 
arts have been lost, the Christian era is superior to 
all others in the bad eminence of whisky and rum and 
gin. The modern drunk is a hundred-fold worse than 
the ancient drunk. Noah in his intoxication became 
imbecile, but the victims of modern alcoholism have 
to struggle with whole menageries of wild beasts and 
jungles of hissing serpents and perditions of blas- 
pheming demons. An arch-fiend arrived in our 
world, and he built an invisible cauldron of tempta- 
tion. He built that cauldron strong and stout for all 
ages and all nations. First he squeezed into the caul- 
dron the juices of the forbidden fruit of Paradise. 
Then he gathered for it a distillation from the har- 
vest fields and the orchards of the hemispheres. 
Then he poured into this cauldron capsicum, and 
copperas, and logwood, and deadly nightshade, and 
assault and battery, and vitriol, and opium, and rum, 
and murder, and sulphuric acid, and theft, and pot- 
ash, and cochineal, and red carrots, and poverty, and 
death, and hops. But it was a dry compound, and it 
must be moistened, and it must be liquefied, and so 
the arch-fiend poured into that cauldron the tears- of 
centuries of orphanage and widowhood, and he 
poured in the blood of twenty thousand assassina- 
tions. And then the arch-fiend took a shovel that he 
had brought up from the furnaces beneath, and he 



THE ARCH-FIEND OF THE NATIONS. 6oi 

put that shovel into this great cauldron and begin 
to stir, and the cauldron began to heave, and rock, 
and boil, and sputter, and hiss, and smoke, and the 
nations gathered around it with cups and tankards 
and demijohns and kegs, and there was enough for 
all, and the arch-fiend cried : " Aha ! champion fiend 
am I. Who has done more than I have for coffins 
and graveyards and prisons and insane asylums, and 
the populating of the lost world? And when this, 
cauldron is emptied, I'll fill it again, and I'll stir it 
again, and it will smoke again, and that smoke will 
join another smoke — the smoke of a torment that 
ascendeth forever and ever. 

" I drove fifty ships on the rocks of Newfoundland 
and the Skerries and the Goodwins. I defeated the 
Northern army at Fredericksburg. I have ruined 
more senators than will gather next winter in the 
national councils. I have ruined more lords than 
will be gathered in the House of Peers. The cup 
out of which I ordinarily drink is a bleached human 
skull, and the upholstery of my palace is so rich a 
crimson because it is dyed in human gore, and the 
mosaic of my floors is made up of the bones of chil- 
dren dashed to death by drunken parents, and my 
favorite music — sweeter than Te Deum or triumphal 
march — my favorite music is the cry of daughters 
turned out at midnight on the street because father 
has come home from the carousal, and the seven- 
hundred-voiced shriek of the sinking steamer because 
the captain was not himself when he put the ship on 
the wrong course. Champion fiend am I ! I have 
kindled more fires, I have wrung out more agonies, 
I have stretched out' more midnight shadows, I have 
opened more Golgothas, I have rolled more jugger- 



602 THE ARCH-FIEND OF THE NATIONS. 



nauts, I have damned more souls than any other 
emissary of diabolism. Champion fiend am I ! " 

Drunkenness is the greatest evil of this nation, and 
it takes no logical process to prove that a drunken 
nation cannot long be a free nation. I call your at- 
tention to the fact that drunkenness is not subsiding, 
certainly that it is not at a standstill, but that it is on 
an onward march, and it is a double quick. Where 
there was one drunken home there are ten drunken 
homes. Where there was one drunkard's grave there 
are twenty drunkards' graves. 

According to United States Government figures, 
in 1840 there were 23,000,000 gallons of beer sold. 
Last year there were 551,000,000 gallons. Accord- 
ing to the governmental figures, in the year 1840 there 
were 5,000,000 gallons of wine sold. Last year there 
were 25,000,000 gallons of wine. It is on the increase. 
Talk about crooked whisky — by which men mean 
the whisky that does not pay the tax to government 
— I tell you all strong drink is crooked. Crooked 
otard, crooked cognac, crooked schnapps, crooked 
beer, crooked wine, crooked whisky, because it 
makes a man's path crooked, and his life crooked, and 
his death crooked, and his eternitv crooked. 

If I could gather all the armies of the dead drunk- 
ards and have them come to resurrection, and then 
add to that host all the armies of living drunkards, 
five and ten abreast, and then if I could have you 
mount a horse and ride along that line for review, 
you would ride that horse until he dropped frohi 
exhaustion, and you would mount another horse and 
ride until he fell from exhaustion, and you would, 
take another and another, and you would ride along 
hour after hour, and day after day. Great host, in 



THE ARCH-FIEND OF THE NATIONS. 603 

regiments, in brigades. Great armies of them. And 
then if you had voice enough stentorian to make 
them all hear, and you could give the command, 
" Forward, march !" their first tramp would make the 
earth tremble. I do not care which way you look in 
the community to-day, the evil is increasing. 

I call your attention to the fact that there are 
thousands of people born with a thirst for strong 
drink — a fact too often ignored. Along some ances- 
tral lines there runs the river of temptation. There 
are children whose swaddling clothes are torn off 
the shroud of death. 

Many a father has made a will of this sort : " In 
the name of God, amen. I bequeath to my children 
my houses and lands and estates, share and share 
shall they alike. Hereto I affix my hand and seal in 
the presence of witnesses." And yet, perhaps that 
very man has made another will that the people have 
never read, and that has not been proved in the 
courts. That will put in writing would read some- 
thing like this : " In the name of disease and appetite 
and death, amen. I bequeath to my children my evil 
habits, my tankards shall be theirs, my wine-cup shall 
be theirs, my destroyed reputation shall be theirs. 
Share and share alike shall they in the infamy. 
Hereto I affix my hand and seal in the presence of 
all the applauding harpies of hell." 

From the multitude of those who have the evil 
habit born with them, this army is being augmented. 
And I am sorry to say that a great many of the drug- 
stores are abetting this evil, and alcohol is sold under 
the name of bitters. 

It is bitters for this, and bitters for that, and bitters 
for some other thing; and good men deceived, not 



604 THE ARCH-FIEND OF THE NATIONS. 

knowing there is any thraldom of alcoholism coming 
from that source, are going down, and some day a 
man sits with the bottle of black bitters on his table, 
and the cork flies out, and after it flies a fiend, and 
clutches the man by his throat, and says: "Aha! I 
have been after you for ten years. I have got you 
now. Down with you, down with you!" Bitters? 
Ah ! yes. They make a man's family bitter, and his 
home bitter, and his disposition bitter, and his death 
bitter, and his hell bitter. Bitters : A vast army all 
the time increasing. And let me also say that it is as 
thoroughly organized as any army, with commander- 
in-chief, staff-officers, infantry, cavalry, batteries, sut- 
lerships, and flaming ensigns, and that every candi- 
date for office in America will yet have to pronounce 
himself the friend or foe of the liquor traffic. 

I have in my possession the circular of a brewers 
association — a circular sent to all candidates for office ; 
it has been sent, or will be sent— a form to be filled 
up, saying whether the candidate is a friend of the 
liquor traffic, or its enemy ; and if he is an enemy of 
the business then the man is doomed ; or if he declines 
to fill up the circular, and send it back, his silence is 
taken as a negative answer. 

It seems to me it is about time for the 17,000,000 
professors of religion in America to take sides. It 
is going to be an out-and-out battle between drunken- 
ness and sobriety, between heaven and hell, between 
God and the devil. Take sides before there is any 
further national decadence ; take sides before your 
sons are sacrificed, and the new home of your daugh- 
ter goes down under the alcoholism of an embruted 
husband. Take sides while your' voice, your pen, 
your prayer, your vote, may have any influence in 



THE ARCH-FIEND OF THE NATIONS. 605 

arresting the despoliation of this nation. If the 17,- 
000,000 professors of religion should take sides on 
this subject, it would not be very long before the 
destiny of this nation would be decided in the right 
direction. 

Is it a State evil ? or is it a national evil ? Does it 
belong to the North ? or does it belong to the South ? 
Does it belong to the East ? or does it belong to the 
West? Ah! there is not an American river into 
which its tears have not fallen, and into which its 
suicides have not plunged. What ruined that 
Southern plantation ? every field a fortune, the pro- 
prietor and his family once the most affluent support- 
ers of summer watering-places. What threw that New 
England farm into decay and turned the roseate 
cheeks that bloomed at the foot of the Green Moun- 
tains into the pallor of despair? What has smitten 
every street of every village, town, and city of this 
continent with a moral pestilence ? Strong drink. 

To prove that this is a national evil, I call up three 
States in opposite directions — Maine, Iowa, and 
Georgia. Let them testify in regard to this. State 
of Maine says : " It is so great an evil up here we 
have anathematized it as a State." State of Iowa 
says : " It is so great an evil out here we have pro- 
hibited it by constitutional amendment." State of 
Georgia says : " It is so great an evil down here that 
ninety counties of this State have made the sale of 
intoxicating drink a criminality." So the word comes 
up from all sources, and it is going to be a Waterloo, 
and I want you to know on what side I am going to 
be when that Waterloo is fully come, and I want you 
to be on the right side. Either drunkenness will be 
destroyed in this country, or the American Govern- 



606 THE ARCH-FIEND OF THE NATIONS. 



ment will be destroyed. Drunkenness and free insti- 
tutions are coming into a death grapple. 

Oh, how many are waiting to see if something can 
not be done ! Thousands of drunkards waiting who 
cannot go ten minutes in any direction without 
having the temptation glaring before their eyes or 
appealing to their nostrils, they fighting against it 
with enfeebled will and diseased appetite, conquering, 
then surrendering, conquering again and surrender- 
ing again, and crying : " How long, O Lord, how 
long before these infamous solicitations shall be 
gone ? " 

And how many mothers there are waiting to see if 
this national curse cannot lift ! Oh, is that the boy 
that had the honest breath who comes home with 
breath vitiated or disguised ? What a change ! How 
quickly those habits of early coming home have been 
exchanged for the rattling of the night-key in the 
door long after the last watchman has gone by and 
tried to see that everything was closed up for the 
night ! Oh, what a change for that young man who 
we had hope would do something in merchandise, or 
in artisanship, or in a profession, that would do honor 
to the family name long after mother's wrinkled 
hands are folded from the last toil! All that ex- 
changed for startled look when the door-bell rings, 
lest something has happened. And the wish that the 
scarlet fever twenty years ago had been fatal, for 
then he would have gone directly to the bosom of 
his Saviour. But alas ! poor old soul, she has lived 
to experience what Solomon said : "A foolish son is 
a heaviness to his mother." 

Oh, what a funeral it will be when that boy is 
brought home dead ! And how mother will sit there 



THE ARCH-FIEND OF THE NATIONS. 607 

and say : "Is this my boy that I used to fondle, and 
that I walked the floor with in the night when he 
was sick? Is this the boy that I held to the baptis- 
mal font for baptism ? Is this the boy for whom I 
toiled until the blood burst from the tips of my fin- 
gers that he might have a good start and a good 
home? Lord, why hast Thou let me live to see this? 
Can it be that these swollen hands are the ones that 
used to wander over my face when rocking him to 
sleep ? Can it be that this is the swollen brow that 
I once so rapturously kissed ? Poor boy ! how tired 
he does look. I wonder who struck him that blow 
across the temples ! I wonder if he uttered a dying 
prayer ! Wake up, my son ; don't you hear me ? 
wake up ! Oh, he can't hear me ! Dead, dead, dead ! 
4 Oh, Absalom, my son, my son, would God that I 
had died for thee, oh, Absalom, my son, my son ! ' " 

I am not much of a mathematician, and I cannot 
estimate it ; but is there any one here quick enough 
at figures to estimate how many mothers there are 
waiting for something to be done ? Aye, there are 
many wives waiting for domestic rescue. He prom- 
ised something different from tha£ when, after the 
long acquaintance and the careful scrutiny of charac- 
ter, the hand and the heart were offered and accepted. 
What a hell on earth a woman lives in who has a 
drunken husband ! 

O Death, how lovely thou art to her, and how soft 
and warm thy skeleton hand ! The sepulchre at mid- 
night in winter is a king's drawing-room compared 
with that woman's home. It is not so much the blow 
on the head that hurts, as the blow on the heart. The 
rum fiend came to the door of that beautiful home 
and opened the door and stood there, and said : " I 



6o8 THE ARCH-FIEND OF THE NATIONS. 

curse this dwelling with an unrelenting curse. I 
curse .that father into a maniac, I curse that mother 
into a pauper. I curse those sons into vagabonds. I 
curse those daughters into profligacy. Cursed be 
bread-tray and cradle. Cursed be couch and chair 
and family Bible with record of marriages and births 
and deaths. Curse upon curse." Oh, how many 
wives are there waiting to see if something cannot 
be done to shake these frosts of the second death off 
the orange blossoms ! Yea, God is waiting, the God 
who works through human instrumentalities, waiting 
to see whether this nation is going to overthrow this 
evil ; and if it refuse to do so God will wipe out the 
nation as He did Phoenicia, as He did Rome, as He 
did Thebes, as He did Babylon. Aye, He is waiting 
to see what the church of God will do. If the 
church does not do its work, then He will wipe it 
out as He did the church of Ephesus, church of 
Thyatira, church of Sardis. The Protestant and 
Roman Catholic churches to-day stand side by side 
with an impotent look, gazing on this evil, which 
costs this country more than a billion dollars a year 
to-take care of tfie 800,000 paupers, and the 315,000 
criminals, and the 30,000 idiots, and to bury the 75,- 
000 drunkards. 

Protagoras boasted that out of the sixty years of 
his life forty years he had spent in ruining youth ; 
but the arch fiend of the nations may make the more 
infamous boast that all its life it has been ruining the 
bodies, minds, and souls of the human race. 

Put on your spectacles and take a candle and 
examine the platforms of the two leading political 
parties of this country, and see what they are doing 
for the arrest of this evil, and for the overthrow of 



THE ARCH-FIEND OF THE NATIONS. 609 

this abomination. Resolutions — oh yes, resolutions 
about Mormonism ! It is safe to attack that organ- 
ized nastiness 2,000 miles away. But not one resolu- 
tion against drunkenness, which would turn this 
entire nation into one bestial Salt Lake City. Reso- 
lutions against political corruption, but not one word 
about drunkenness, which would rot this nation from 
scalp to heel. Resolutions about protection, against 
competition with foreign industries, but not one word 
about protection of family and church and nation 
against the scalding, blasting, all-consuming, damning 
tariff of strong drink put upon every financial, indi- 
vidual, spiritual, moral, national interest. The Demo- 
cratic party — in power for the most of the time for 
forty years — what did that national party do for the 
extirpation of this evil? Nothing, absolutely noth- 
ing, appallingly nothing. The Republican party has 
been in power for about a quarter of a century — 
what has it done as a national party to extirpate this 
evil ? Nothing, absolutely nothing, appallingly noth- 
ing. I look in another direction. 

The Church of God is the grandest and most 
glorious institution on earth. What has it in solid 
phalanx accomplished for the overthrow of drunken- 
ness? Have its forces ever been marshaled? No, 
not in this direction. 

The church holds the balance of power in America; 
and if Christian people — the men and the women who 
profess to love the Lord Jesus Christ, and to love 
purity, and to be the sworn enemies of all unclean- 
ness and debauchery and sin — if all such would march 
side by side and shoulder to shoulder, this evil would 
soon be overthrown. Think of 300,000 churches and 
Sunday-schools in Christendom, marching sboulder 

39 



6lO THE ARCH-FIEND OF THE NATIONS. 

to shoulder ! How very short a time it would take 
them to put down this evil, if all the churches of God 
— trans- Atlantic and cis-Atlantic — were armed on this 
subject ! 

Young men of America, pass over into the army of 
teetotalism. Whisky, good to preserve corpses, 
ought never to turn you into a corpse. Tens of 
thousands of young men have been dragged out of 
respectability, and out of purity, and out of good 
character, and into darkness, by this infernal stuff 
called strong drink. Do not touch it ! Do not 
touch it ! 



CHAPTER LX. 



THE DEMAND OF GOD AND CIVILIZATION. 

There have been in the world hundreds of political 
parties. They did their work. They lost their pres- 
tige. They expired. Their names are forgotten. 
Enough for me to declare what I believe God and 
civilization demand of the two political parties of this 
day, or their extermination. God and civilization de- 
mand of the political parties of this day a plank anti- 
Mormonistic. It is high time that the nation stopped 
playing with this cancer. All the plasters of political 
quacks only aggravate it, and nothing but the sur- 
gery of the sword will cure it. All the congressional 
laws on this subject have been notorious failures. 
Meanwhile the great monster sits between the two 
mountains — the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Ne- 
vadas — sits in defiance and mockery, sometimes hold- 
ing its sides with uncontrollable mirth at our national 
impotency. Shipload after shipload of Mormons are 
regurgitated at your Castle Garden, and hundreds 
and thousands of them are being sent on to the great 
moral lazaretto of the West. Others are on the way, 
and the Atlantic is heaving toward us the great surges 
of foreign libertinism. This moment the emissaries of 
that organized lust are busy in Norway and Sweden 
and England and Ireland and Scotland and Germany, 
breaking up homes, and with infernal cords draw- 
ing the population this way, a population which 

6i 3 



614 THE DEMAND OF GOD AND CIVILIZATION. 

will be dumped as carrion on the American terri- 
tories. American crime, with its long rake stretched 
across other continents, is heaping up on this land 
great winrows of abomination. Worse and worse. 
Four hundred Mormons coming into our port in one 
day, six hundred in another day, eight hundred in 
another day. 

Are we so cowardly and selfish in this generation 
that we are going to bequeath to the following gen- 
erations this great evil ? Letting it go on until our chil- 
dren come to the front and we are safely entrenched 
under the mound of our own sepulchres, leaving our 
children through all their active life to wonder why 
we postponed this evil for their extirpation when we 
might have destroyed it with a hundred-fold less ex- 
posure. What a legacy for this generation to leave 
the following generation ! A vast acreage of swelter- 
ing putrefaction, of lowest beastliness, of suffocating 
stench, all the time becoming more and more mal-odo- 
rous and rotten and damnable. We want some great 
political party in some strong and unmistakable plank 
to declare that it will extirpate heroically and imme- 
diately this great harem of the American continent. 
We want some President of the United States to 
come in on such an anti-Mormonistic platform, and in 
his opening message to Congress ask for an appropri- 
ation for military expedition, and then put Phil Sheri- 
dan in his lightning stirrups, heading his horse west- 
ward, and in one year Mormonism will be extirpated 
and national decency vindicated. Compelling Mor- 
monistic chiefs to take oath of allegiance will not do 
it, for they have declared in open assembly that per-, 
jury in their cause is commendable. Religious tracts 
on purity amount to nothing. They will not read 



THE DEMAND OF GOD AND CIVILIZATION. 6l$ 

them. Anything shorter than bayonets and any- 
thing softer than bullets will never do that work. 

Every day you open a paper and you see in the 
State of New York some bigamist arrested and pun- 
ished. What you prohibit on a small scale for a 
State you allow on a large scale for a nation. Big- 
amy must be put down. Polygamy must go free. 
What has been the effect, my friends ? It has de- 
moralized this whole nation. That carbuncle on the 
back of the nation has sickened all the nerves, and 
muscles, and arteries, and veins, and limbs of the 
body politic. I account in that way for many of the 
loose ideas abroad on all sides on the subject of the 
marriage relation. Divorce by the wholesale. Con- 
cubinage in high circles. Libertinism, if gloved and 
patent leathered, admitted into high circle. The 
malaria of Salt Lake City has smitten the nation with 
moral typhoid. The bad influence has well-nigh 
spiked that gun of Sinai which needs to thunder 
over the New England hills, over the savannas of the 
South and over the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra 
Nevadas clear to the Pacific coast, " Thou shalt not 
commit adultery!" In 1878, in the State of Maine, 
over 400 cases of divorce. In the State of Mass- 
achusetts, in the same year, over 600 divorces. In 
the little State of Connecticut in that year, over 400 
divorces. In New England in that year 2,113 
divorces. The County of Cook, in Illinois, over 800 
divorces in one year. Advertisements in newspapers 
saying, " Divorce legally and quietly effected. Can 
pay in installments !" Some of the New York law- 
yers giving their entire time to domestic separations 
— suborning witnesses, giving advice as to how many 
months it is necessary to be out of the city, inducing 



6l6 THE DEMAND OF GOD AND CIVILIZATION. 

suspicious complications, sending detective sleuth 
hounds on the track of good citizens, until the honest 
lawyers of these cities were compelled a little while 
ago to make outcry against the bemeaning of their 
honorable profession. Looser and looser ideas on 
the subject of marriage, until sometimes the ques- 
tion of divorce is taken into consideration in the 
wedding solemnities, and people promise fidelity till 
death do them part, and say afterward softly, " per- 
haps," or "may be," u I rather think so." All over 
this land more and more marriage in fun. 

We do not want divorce made more easy in this 
country ; we want it made more hard, so that people 
will be more cautious in their affiancing, and you 
will understand that if you marry a brute of a hus- 
band or a fool of a wife, you will have to stand it. 
Ah ! my friends, there will be no toning up on this 
subject, there will be no moral health in the United 
States on the subject of the marriage relation until 
this nation shall slough off this Mormonistic ulcer, 
and burn out with caustic of gunpowder this wound 
which has been so long feculent and ichorous and 
deathful. If you are under the delusion that by mild 
laws passed against Mormonism the evil will b.e extir- 
pated, you are making an awful mistake. The sooner 
you get over it the better. God and civilization 
demand of both political parties now a plank anti- 
Mormonistic. 

Again, there is demanded of the political parties in 
this day, a plank of intelligent helpfulness for the 
great foreign population which have come among us. 
It is too late now to discuss whether we had better 
let them come. T nev are here. They are coming 
this moment through the Narrows, they are coming 



THE DEMAND OF GOD AND CIVILIZATION. 617 

this moment through the gates of Castle Garden, 
they are this moment taking the first full inhalation 
of the free air of America, and they will continue to 
come as long as this country is the best place to live 
in. You might as well pass a law prohibiting sum- 
mer bees from alighting on a field of blossoming 
buckwheat, you might as well prohibit the stags of 
the mountains from coming down to the deer lick, as 
to prohibit the hunger-bitten nations of Europe from 
coming to this land of bread, as to prohibit the peo- 
ple of England, Ireland, Scotland, Norway, Sweden, 
and Germany, working themselves to death on small 
wages on the other side the sea, from coming to this 
land, where there are the largest compensations 
under the sun. Why did God spread out the prai- 
ries of Dakota, and roll the precious ore into Col- 
orado? It was that all the earth might come and 
plow, and come and dig. Just as long as the centrif- 
ugal force of foreign despotisms throw them off, just 
so long will the centripetal force of American institu- 
tions draw them here. 

And that is what is going to make this the might- 
iest nation of the earth. Intermarriage of nation- 
alities. Not circle intermarrying circle, and nation 
intermarrying nation, but it is going to be Italian and 
Norwegian, Russian and Celt, Scotch and French, 
English and American. The American of a hundred 
years from now is to be different from the American 
of to-day. German brain, Irish wit, French civility, 
Scotch firmness, English loyalty, Italian aesthetics 
packed into one man, and he an American. It is this 
intermarriage of nationalities that is going to make 
the American race the mightiest race of the ages. 
Now, I say, in God's name let them come. 



6l8 THE DEMAND OF GOD AND CIVILIZATION. 

But what are we doing for the moral and intel- 
lectual culture of the 500,000 foreigners who came in 
one year, and the 600,000 who came in another year, 
and the 800,000 who came in another year, and the 
1,000,000 who came into our various American ports. 
What are we doing for them ? Well, we are doing a 
great deal for them. We steal their baggage as soon 
as they get ashore ! We send them up to a boarding- 
house where the least they lose is their money. We 
swindle them within ten minutes after they get 
ashore. We are doing a great deal for them ! But 
what are we doing to introduce them into the duties 
of good citizenship ? Many of them never saw a 
ballot-box, many of them never heard of the Con- 
stitution of the United States, many of them have no 
acquaintance with our laws. Now, I say, let the 
Government ol the United States, so commanded by 
some political party, give to every immigrant who 
lands here a volume in good type and well bound for 
long usage — a volume containing the Declaration of 
Independence, the Constitution of the United States, 
and a chapter on the spirit of our Government. Let 
there be such a book on every shelf of every free 
library in America. While the American Bible 
Society puts into the right hand of every immigrant 
a copy of the Holy Scriptures, let the Government 
of the United States, so commanded by some polit- 
ical party, put into the left hand of every immigrant 
a volume instructing him in the duties of good 
citizenship. There are thousands of foreigners in 
this land who need to learn that the ballot-box is not 
a footstool but a throne; not something to put your 
foot on, but something to bow before. 

Again, it is demanded of the political parties of this 



•the demand of god and civilization. 619 

day that they have a plank that shall acknowledge 
God. Let there be no favoring of sects. Let Trini- 
tarian and Unitarian, Jew and Gentile, Protestant 
and Roman Catholic, be alike in the sight of the law 
— every man free to worship in his own way — but let 
no political party think it can do its duty, unless it 
acknowledges that God, who built this continent, 
and revealed it at the right time to the discoverer, 
and who has reared here a prosperity which has been 
given to no other people. " Oh," says some one, 
" there are people in this country who do not believe 
in a God, and it would be an insult to them." Well, 
there are people in this country who do not believe 
in common decency, or common honesty, or any kind 
of government, preferring anarchy. Your every 
platform is an insult to them. You ought not to re- 
gard a man who does not believe in God any more 
than you should regard a man who refuses to believe 
in common decency. Your pocketbook is not safe a 
moment in the presence of an atheist ! God is the 
only source of good government. Why not, then, 
say so, and let the chairman of the committee on res- 
olutions in your national convention take a pen full 
of ink, and with bold hand head the document with 
one significant, "Whereas," acknowledging the good- 
ness of God in the past, and begging His kindness 
and protection for the future. 

For the lack of recognition of God in your political 
platforms they amount to nothing. They both make 
loud declaration about civil service reform, and it has 
been a failure. If you can take now in your cool 
moments the declaration made by the Democratic 
party in Cincinnati in 1880, and the declaration made 
by the Republican party in Chicago in 1880, and read 



620 THE DEMAND OF GOD AND CIVILIZATION. 

those two declarations on the subject of civil service 
reform, and then think of what has transpired, and 
control your mirth, you have more self-control than 
I have. My child asks me what is civil service reform^ 
and I tell him, as near as I can understand, it is that 
when the Republican party get the government of a 
State they are to turn out the Democrats, and when 
the Democrats get the supremacy in the State they 
are to turn out the Republicans. 

Your platforms cry out for reform, and promise 
reform, if they are only kept in power, or may obtain 
power. How much do they mean by reform ? See 
what the Republican party did in 1876 in Louisiana 
and what the Democratic party did three or four 
years after in the gubernatorial election in Maine ! 
Credit Mobilier of eleven years ago, River and Har- 
bor Bill, by which last year the taxpayers of the 
United States were swindled out of fifty millions of 
dollars — in both infamies the two parties shoulder to 
shoulder, and side to side. What you want is more 
of God in your pronunciamentoes. Without Him 
reform is retrogression, and gain is loss, and victory 
is defeat. 

Why, my friends, this country belongs to God, and 
we ought in every possible way to acknowledge it. 
From the moment that, on an October morning, in 
1492, Columbus looked over the side of the ship, and 
saw the carved staff which made him think he was 
near an inhabited country, and saw also a thorn and 
a cluster of berries — type of our history ever since, 
the piercing sorrows and the cluster of national joys 
— until this hour, our country has been bounded on 
the north and south and east and west by the good- 
ness of God. The Huguenots took possession of the 



THE DEMAND OF GOD AND CIVILIZATION. 62 1 

Carolinas in the name of God ; William Penn settled 
Philadelphia in the name of God ; the Hollanders 
took possession of New York in the name of God ; 
the Pilgrim Fathers settled New England in the name 
of God. Preceding the first gun of Bunker Hill, at 
the voice of prayer all heads uncovered. In the 
war of 1812 an officer came to General Andrew 
Jackson and said : " There is an unusual noise in the 
camp ; it ought to be stopped." General Jackson 
said: "What is the noise?" The officer said : " It 
is the voices of prayer and praise." And . the Gen- 
eral said ; " God forbid that prayer and praise should 
be an unusual noise in the encampment ; you had 
better go and join them." Prayer at Valley Forge, 
prayer at Monmouth, prayer at Atlanta, prayer at 
South Mountain, prayer at Gettysburg. 

" Oh," says some infidel, " the Northern people 
prayed on one side, and the Southern people prayed 
on the other side, and so it didn't amount to anything." 
And I have heard good Christian people confounded 
with the infidel statement, when it is as plain to me 
as my right hand. Yes, the Northern people prayed 
in one way, and the Southern people prayed in 
another way, and God answered in His own way, 
giving to the North the re-establishment of the Gov- 
ernment, and giving to the South larger opportu- 
nities, larger than she had ever anticipated, the har- 
nessing of her rivers in great manufacturing interests, 
until the Mobile, and the Tallapoosa, and the Chatta- 
hoochee, are Southern Merrimacs, and the unrolling 
of great mines of coal and iron, of which the world 
knew nothing, and opening before her opportuni- 
ties of wealth which will give ninety -nine per cent, 
more of affluence than she ever possessed. And, in- 



622 THE DEMAND OF GOD AND CIVILIZATION. 

stead of the black hands of American slaves emanci- 
pated, there are the more industrious and black hands 
of the coal and iron industries of the South which 
will achieve for her fabulous and unimagined wealth. 

"And there are domes of white blossoms where spread the white tent, 
And there are ploughs in the track where the war wagons went, 
And there are songs where they lifted up Rachel's lament." 

Oh, you are a stupid man if you do not understand 
how God answered Abraham Lincoln's prayer in the 
White House, and Stonewall Jackson's prayer in the 
saddle, and answered all the prayers of all the cathe- 
drals on both sides of Mason and Dixon's Line. 
God's country all the way past. God's country 
now. 

Put His name in your pronunciamentoes, put His 
name on your ensigns, put His name on your city 
and State and national enterprises, put His name in 
your hearts. To most of us this country was the 
cradle, and to most of us it will be the grave. We 
want the same glorious privileges which we enjoy to 
go down to our children. We can not sleep well the 
last sleep, nor will the pillow of dust be easy to our 
heads until we are assured that the God of our 
American institutions in the past will be the God of 
our American institutions in the days that are to 
come. Oh, when all the rivers which empty into 
the Atlantic and Pacific seas shall pull on factory 
bands, when all the great mines of gold, and silver, 
and iron, and coal shall be laid bare for the nation, 
when the last swamp shall be reclaimed, and the last 
jungle cleared, and the last American desert Eden- 
ized, and from sea to sea the continent shall be occu- 
pied by more than twelve hundred million souls, 
may it be found that moral and religious influences 



THE DEMAND OF GOD AND CIVILIZATION. 623 

were multiplied in more rapid ratio than the popu- 
lation. And then there shall be four doxologies 
coming from north, and south, and east, and west— 
four doxologies rolling toward each other and meet- 
ing mid-continent with such dash of holy joy that 
they shall mount to the throne. 

" And Heaven's high arch resound again 
With 'peace on earth, good will to men.'" 



CHAPTER LXI. 

BOSSISM. 

Each village and town has what is called in old- 
fashioned parlance its " boss," and every city has its 
" boss," and every State its " boss," and all these 
" bosses " will come together and elect a great 
national " boss." Against this slavery of American 
politics I protest, and demand that in convention and 
in ballot-box every man, without hindrance or male- 
diction, vote as he thinks best, God his only judge. 

In the first place, if we would break this slavery of 
American politics, we must decline every four years 
to believe that everything is in peril. If our Ameri- 
can institutions every four years are in danger of 
smash-up, the sooner they go to pieces the better, 
and we have substituted a government which shall 
have in it some style, some element of durability. I 
remember eleven Presidential elections, and in each 
one we were told that everything was in peril. As 
near as I could tell, we were within a quarter of an 
inch of the eternal precipice. Voters went to the 
ballot-box tremulous with omens. Wagons and car- 
riages were sent for the aged and the invalid. At 
party expense these persons were brought forth, and 
patriots who by strange coincidence at the same time 
were candidates for office — these patriots lifted the 
invalids from the bed and the wagon, where there 
were pillows and mattresses, and the unfortunates 

624 



BOSSISM. 625 

were carefully supported on both sides to the polls, 
where they deposited for the very life of the country 
their precious votes. 

Now, while there have been pivotal elections, in 
the majority of cases there is nothing at stake but 
official patronage. This magnifying of national peril 
and this working before the public mind, on wires 
the skeleton of national dangers every four years, 
halts business and demoralizes everything. What do 
Western merchants want to come here and buy 
goods for if next autumn everything is to be a howl- 
ing wilderness ? What do Eastern men want to buy 
Western lands for when everything is to be paralyzed ? 
All business men will tell you that every four years 
is an idle year. Why ? Because everything is stag- 
nated by this cry of peril when there is no peril, 
there is no crisis. 

I remember that at eight years of age I stood in 
the blistering sun and barefoot, at Somerville, New 
Jersey, hearing a Western orator, who persuaded me 
in that Presidential election that if William Henry 
Harrison was elected instead of Martin Van Buren, 
there would be no use of my growing up, because 
there would be no country to grow in ! Not long ago, 
in Music Hall, Boston, I was lecturing, and just be- 
fore the lecture there I was told a Western orator 
would that night speak at Faneuil Hall ; so I hastened 
through my work and got down to the Cradle of 
Liberty, and found it that night rocked by the same 
Western orator and the same Western speech, and 
the only difference between the speech I heard forty 
years ago and that speech was, in one case it was 
William Henry Harrison, and in the other it was 
Benjamin F. Butler. 



626 



BOSSISM. 



Many of us remember the Presidential election 
when Henry Clay and James K. Polk were the can- 
didates for the Presidency. My father sat down pale 
and exhausted and sick at the defeat of Henry Clay, 
and said that all was lost. He had felt the magnet- 
ism of that splendid Kentuckian, whose name I can 
not pronounce without feeling an enthusiasm ting- 
ling from scalp to heel. But was everything lost ? 
Through that election we got the Texan domain, and 
door after door of annexation has been opened until 
when the wind blows from the west the national flag 
dips into the Atlantic, and when it blows from the 
east the national flag dips into the Pacific. We were 
positively told that the existence of this nation de- 
pended upon Mr. Lincoln's second election to the 
Presidency ; but immediately after his inauguration 
he died, and Andrew Johnson put the government in 
just the opposite direction, and we -still live. 

During the sixteen years in which I have lived in 
the State of New York, at every gubernatorial elec- 
tion we have been told that everything was at stake. 
Officers have changed, but there has been no change 
in our prosperity except from good to better, and I 
have noticed that the sun rises at about the same time 
in the same month of the year, and the tides come in 
with about the same strength, and it is high time in 
this country we stop this crisis business and under- 
stand that the Lord God has capacity to keep this 
nation on in its high march of prosperity without 
the help of Chicago conventions. 

The old lion of national strength is covered all over 
with greenbottle flies, sucking the life-blood from 
neck and flanks. 

The old lion of our national strength may shake it- 



BOSSISM. 627 

self terrifically, and another set of greenbottle flies, 
but more hungry, will take their place. Do not 
stand agape as to what will happen next. Go about 
your honest everyday business. Do not believe the 
political bureaus that declare that everything is in 
peril. There is no more danger that this Govern- 
ment is going to pieces, than that the moon is going 
to pieces. 

Again, if we want to break this tyranny of Amer- 
ican politics, we must understand that neither party 
is immaculate. 

Do not vote for a man merely because your party 
nominates him. If you want to know how much 
better one party is than the other, I put the Louisi- 
ana Returning Board of one party beside the guber- 
natorial conflict of 1879, i n Maine, and I put the 
Belknap frauds of one party against the Tweed lar- 
cenies of the other. There is a difference in men, but 
the only difference between the parties as to moral 
character to-day, in my estimation, is the difference 
between fifty and half a hundred. Both parties are 
in need of radical reformation, and by the time they 
are reformed they may be reformed out of existence. 

But is there no difference? are there no preferences ? 
Ah ! so far from saying that, a man who does not in- 
telligently, and in the fear and love of God, exercise 
the right of suffrage, is not worthy of American citi- 
zenship. There are preferences, and while every in- 
telligent man and woman in America is to-day ask- 
ing the question, " Who shall be the next President 
of the United States?" I want to say two or three 
things. In the first place, the next President of the 
United States, and every President, ought to have an 
established moral character, There have been times 



628 



BOSSISM. 



when we have had candidates for Governors, and 
candidates for the Presidential chair, who were liber- 
tines and gamblers and drunkards. In the House of 
Representatives and in the United States Senate we 
have had men who could not walk straight because 
of intoxication, representing Illinois and Pennsyl- 
vania and New York. I am glad to know that the 
question of good morals is coming into every political 
canvass. I do not care how talented a man is, if he 
is bad. 

Genius is worse than stupidity, if it move in the 
wrong direction. In a nation where there are so 
many homes, we must have at the head of it a man 
who honors the sanctity of the domestic circle. In a 
nation where there are so many young men looking 
for an example of good character, we must have at 
the head only one characterized by integrity. A man 
who cannot govern himself cannot govern fifty mil- 
lions of people. Our schools, our colleges, our uni- 
versities, our churches, and our homesteads must 
fight for good morals. 

But do not listen to the hue and cry of partisan- 
ship. You can get no idea from what newspapers 
have to say of men, what their real character is. 
The best man that God ever made, nominated on 
either side, must wade through obloquy chin-deep. 
Defamation elected James A. Garfield. Defamation 
elected Abraham Lincoln. Defamation, I am told 
by one who remembers the time, elected Andrew 
Jackson, and that is the testimony of one who is far 
from liking Andrew Jackson. You have to take the 
scales and put on one side all the scurrility about the 
Republican candidate, and put on the other side the 
scale all the scurrility about the Democratic candi- 



BOSSISM. 



629 



date, weighing scurrility against scurrility, and the 
man who is most abused and has the most scurrility 
hurled upon him, will be the President. There is a 
philosophy in it, my brethren. There are many bad 
things about human nature, but there are many good 
things about human nature, and one of the best 
things about human nature is that it sympathizes 
with one who is traduced. 

. Have nothing to do, by pen, or type, or voice, in 
the malediction of public men. In the characteriz- 
ation of men in private life we exercise Christian 
principle, and we are, if we are good men, disposed 
to put the best phase and the best interpretation on 
conduct, and it is only a bad man who chooses always 
to think bad of his fellows. Charity thinketh well, 
if it is possible to think well. 

Now, my brethren, let us in public life do as well 
as we do in private life, and the same charity we ex- 
tend toward those in private life extend toward those 
who are in public life. Remember, my friends, when 
you come to judge in regard to the character of 
men who shall be before this nation, you are 
Christian patriots and not scavengers. I abhor this 
defamation of public men. Just as soon as a man 
comes to the front and achieves anything by his elo- 
quence, or by his brilliancy, or by his public services, 
all the hounds of earth and hell get after him. 
Calmly and deliberately judge of men in the fear 
and love of God, as you yourself would like to be 
judged. You yourself perhaps may not come to 
highest political position, but your sons may be on 
the way to the honors of this government. Treat 
men now in public life with the same fairness and 
generosity that you would have your sons treated 
when they come to high position in life. 



630 



BOSSISM. 



Then, in order to be qualified for the chief office 
of this nation, a man must also be a respecter of the 
Christian religion. I apply no religious test. But 
this country, discovered bv Christian men and set- 
tled by Hollanders and Huguenots and the descend- 
ants of men from other lands who were persecuted 
for their religious faith, and who took possession of 
this land in the name of God and heaven — such a 
country as this must have over it one who respects 
the Christian religion. Never, my Christian friends, 
under any circumstances vote for any man who does 
not believe in the existence of God and the divinity 
of the Bible. A man who does not believe in the 
existence of God and the divinity of the Bible I 
would not trust him with a ten-cent piece, much less 
elevate him to the Presidency. This is the only 
foundation of common honest v, the Bible. I often 
hear it said that the Constitution of the United States 
is the foundation of our institutions. It is not. The 
Bible is the foundation. Republican institutions are 
an everlasting impossibility without it. Our first 
President was a Christian. Let our next President 
be at any rate a respecter of the Christian religion. 

Then he must have heart large enough to take in 
all the States and Territories. If a Western man. he 
must not despise the sea-coast or want an immediate 
change of the center of commercial life. If an East- 
ern man, he must not despise the West. If a South- 
ern man, he must not think all men of the North of 
ignoble generation. If a Northern man. he must not 
want to keep up the old grudge which we settled 
twentv-one vears ago. He must have a heart, large 
enough to take in all the nation. There can never be 
anv more conflict in this country. The sword has 



BOSSISM. 



631 



given place to the wheat cradle. The time of dark- 
ness and contention has all gone by, and there is to be 
no more use in this country for the musket except for 
holiday turnout. Our navy-yards are going to be- 
come museums containing ships used in barbaric ages 
for settling by slaughter national differences. The 
eagle has got to get off our coin and the dove take 
its place, the bird of blood giving way for the bird of 
the olive branch. I prescribe for the cure of all national 
evils, and I prescribe for a defence against all national 
peril the Christianization of the people. Let Chris- 
tianity take possession of the ballot-box, there will be 
no illegal voting. Let Christianity take charge of the 
primaries and the caucuses, and we will have right- 
eous nominees. Do not expect that the politicians of 
this country will ever save the land. What have 
they ever done for this country but get office and 
make trouble ? They got us into the four years' war. 
Did they get us out of it ? No. The great masses 
of the people rose up, fought out the fight and then 
commanded peace. Politicians again and again have 
ruined American commerce. Did they restore it? 
No. The great masses of the people, with hard-fisted 
and besweated industry, conquered those financial 
calamities. So much depending upon the great masses 
of the people, let us have them evangelized. 

We want the Gospel of Jesus Christ dominant — 
that Gospel which William E. Gladstone demon- 
strated when he sent an apology a few years ago to 
the Austrian Government. He found he was wrong, 
and apologized for it. Some said, " Oh, what imbe- 
cility !" 1 say it was the grandest specimen of Chris- 
tian character, possible. We settle individual differ- 
ences by explanation and apology. Why not national 



differences? Why by the sword ? "Glory to God 
in the highest, and on earth peace, good will to men."' 

Oh, this is the brightest day in all our history. Our 
land is coming to greater and greater prosperity. 

Agriculture is going to bring all its harvests, and 
manufacturing is going to bring all its adroit fabrics, 
and literature is going to bring all its printing-presses, 
and art is going to bring all its pencils and chisels, 
and commerce is going to bring all its masts, and re- 
ligion is going to bring all its altars and towers, and 
put them down at the feet of Him on whose vesture 
and on whose thigh are written. " King ot kings. 
Lord of lords." Italy for pictures, France tor man- 
ners. Germany for scholarship, the United States for 
God. 



CHAPTER LXIL 

TIIK CHKISTIANIXKO VOTE. 

Look at it — the sacred chest of the ancients. It 
was about five feet long, three leet wide and three feet 
high. It was within and without of pure gold. On 
the top of it stood two angels facing each other with 
outspread wings. In that sacred box was the law, 
and there were in it a great many precious stones. 
With that box went the fate of the nation. Carried 
in front of the host, the waters of the Jordan parted. 
Divinely charged, costly, precious, momentous box. 
No unholy hands might, lay hold of it. It was called 
the ark of the covenant. But you will understand it 
was a box, the most precious box of the ages. 
Where is it now ? Gone forever. Not a crypt of 
church or museum of the world has a fragment of it. 

But is not this nation God's chosen people ? Have 
we not passed through the Red tSea? Have we not 
been led with a pillow of fire by night ? Has this 
nation no ark of the covenant ? Yes. The ballot- 
box, the sacred chest of the nation, the ark of the 
American covenant. 

In it is the law, in it is the divine and the human 
will, in it is the fate of the nation. Carried in front 
of our host again and again, the waters of national 
trouble have parted. Mighty ark of the covenant, 
the American ballot-box ! It is a very old box. 

In Athens, long before the art of printing, the • 
633 



634 



THE CHRISTIANIZED VOTE. 



people' dropped pebbles into it to give expression to 
their sentiments. After that, beans were dropped 
into it — a white bean for the affirmative, a black bean 
for the negative. After that when they wished to 
vote a man out of citizenship they would write his 
name upon a shell and drop that into the box. 

O'Connell and Grote and Cobden and Macaulav 
and Gladstone fought great battles in the introduc- 
tion of the ballot-boxes in England, and to-day it is 
one of the fastnesses of that nation. It is one of the 
corner-stones of our government. It is older than 
the constitution. In it is our national safety. Tell 
me what will be the fate of the American ballot-box, 
the ark of the American covenant, and I will tell you 
what will be the fate of this nation. Give the people 
once a year or once in four years an opportunity to 
express their political sentiments, and you practically 
avoid insurrection and revolution. 

Either give them the ballot, or they will take the 
sword. Without the ballot-box there can be no free 
republican institutions. Milton visiting in Italy 
noticed that on the sides of Vesuvius gardeners and 
farmers were at work while the volcano was in erup- 
tion, and he asked them if they were safe. " Yes," 
said the farmers and the gardeners, "it is safe ; all 
the danger is before the eruption ; then come 
earthquake and terror, but just as soon as the volcano 
begins to pour forth lava we all feel at rest." It is 
the suppression of political sentiment, the suppres- 
sion of public opinion, that makes moral earthquake 
and national earthquake. Let public opinion pour 
forth, and that gives satisfaction, and that gives peace, 
and that gives permanency to good government. 
And yet, though the ballot-box* is the sacred chest 



THE CHRISTIANIZED VOTE, 635 

and the ark of the American covenant, you know as 
well as I know, it has its sworn antagonists. 

Ignorance is a mighty foe. Other things being 
equal, the more intelligence a man has the better he 
is qualified to exercise the right of suffrage. You 
have been ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years studying 
American institutions, you have canvassed all the 
great questions about tariff and home rule and all 
the educational questions, and everything in Amer- 
ican politics you are well acquainted with. You 
consider yourself competent to cast a vote in No- 
vember, and you are competent. You will take your 
position in the line of electors, you will wait for 
your term to come, the judge of election will an- 
nounce your name, you will cast your vote, and pass 
out. Well done. 

But right behind you there will come a man who 
cannot spell the name of controller, or attorney, or 
mayor. He cannot write, or if he can write he uses a 
small "I" for the personal pronoun. He could not tell 
on which side of the Alleghany Mountains Ohio is. 
Educated canary birds, educated horses know more 
than he. He will cast his vote, and it will balance 
your vote. His ignorance is as mighty as your intel- 
ligence. That is not right. All men of fair mind 
will acknowledge that that is not right. Until a man 
can read the Declaration of Independence and the 
Constitution of the United States, and calculate the 
interest on the American debt, and know the differ- 
ence between a republican form of government and 
a monarchy or a despotism, he is unfit to exercise 
the right of suffrage at any ballot-box between Key 
West and Alaska. 

In 1872, in England, there were 2,600,000 children 



6 3 6 



THE CHRISTIANIZED VOTE. 



who ought to have been in school. There were only 
i,333,ooo, in other words, about fifty per cent., and 
of the fifty per cent, not more than five per cent, got 
anything worthy the name of an education. Now, 
take that foreign ignorance, and add it to our Amer- 
ican ignorance, and there will be thousands and 
thousands of people, who are no more qualified to ex- 
ercise the right of suffrage than to lecture on astron- 
omy. How are these things to be corrected ? By 
laws of compulsory education well executed. I go in 
for a law which, after giving fair warning for a few 
years, shall make ignorance a crime. 

There is no excuse for ignorance on these subjects 
in this land, where the common schools make knowl- 
edge as free as the fresh air of heaven. I would have 
a board of examination seated beside the officers of 
registration, and let them decide whether the men 
who come up to vote have any capacity to be mon- 
archs in a land where we are all monarchs. One of 
the most awful foes of the American ballot-box tc-day 
it popular ignorance. Educate the people, give them 
an opportunity to know and understand what they 
do. If they will not take the education, deny them 
the vote. 

Another powerful enemy of this sacred chest, the 
ark of the American covenant, the ballot-box, is spu- 
rious voting. 

In 1880, in Brooklyn, there were a thousand names 
recorded of persons who had no residence here, and 
if there were a thousand attempted frandulent votes 
in the best city on the continent, what may we expect 
in cities not so fortunate ? What a grand thing is 
the law of registration ! Without it elections in this 
country would be a farce. There must be a scrutiny 



THE CHRISTIANIZED VOTE. 637 

on this subject. The law must have keenest twist 
for the neck of repeaters. Something more than 
slight fine and short imprisonment. It is an attempt 
at the assassination of the republic, when a man at- 
tempts to put in a spurious vote. In olden times, 
when men laid unholy hands on the ark of the cove- 
nant they dropped down dead. Witness Uzzah. 
And when men attempt to put unholy hands on the 
American ballot-box, the ark of the American cove- 
nant, they deserve extermination. 

Another powerful foe of this sacred chest is 
intimidation. 

Corporations sometimes demand that their em- 
ployes vote in this and that way. It is skillfully 
done. It is not positively in so many words de- 
manded, but the employe understands he will be 
frozen out of the establishment unless he votes as the 
firm do. So you can go into factory villages, and 
having found out the politics of the head men in the 
factory, you can tell which way the election is going. 
Now, that is damnable. If, in any precinct in the 
United States, a man cannot vote as he pleases, there 
is something awfully wrong. 

How do you treat that employe who votes differ- 
ently from what you do ? Oh, you say you do not 
interfere with his right of suffrage. But you call 
him into your private office, and you find fault with 
his work, and after a while you tell him there is an 
uncle, or an aunt, or a niece, or a nephew that must 
have that position. You do not say it is because he 
voted this or that way, but he knows, and God knows 
it is. If that man has given to you in hard work an 
equivalent for the wages you pay him, you have no 
right to ask anything else of him. He sold you his 



638 



THE CHRISTIANIZED VOTE. 



work ; he did not sell you his political or religious 
principles. But you know as well as I do there is 
sometimes on that sacred chest, the ark of the Amer- 
ican covenant, a shadow corporate or monopolistic. 

I do not wonder at the vehemence of Lord Chief- 
Justice Holt, of England, when he said : " Let the 
people vote fairly. Interference with a man's vote is 
in behalf of this or that party. I give you notice 
that if an offender against the law comes before me, I 
will charge the jury to make him pay well for it." 
No shadow plutocratic, or mobocratic, or capitalistic. 
Every man voting in his own way — God and his own 
conscience the only dictator. 

Another powerful foe of that sacred chest, the ark - 
of the American covenant, the ballot-box, is bribery. 

You know something of the hundreds of thousands 
of dollars that were expended to carry Indiana in 
1880. You know something of the vast sums of 
money expended in Brooklyn and New York in 
other years to carry elections. Bribery is one of the 
disgraces of this country. It is often the case that a 
man is nominated for office with reference to his 
capacity to provide money for the elections or with 
reference to his capacity to command money from 
others. You know the names of men who^ have at 
different times gone into the Gubernatorial chair or 
Congressional office buying their way all through. I 
tell you no news. Your patriotic heart has been 
pained again and again with it. 

Very often it is not money that bribes, but it is 
office. "You make me President and I'll make you 
Secretary of State, or Attorney-General, or some- 
thing else; you make me Governor and I'll make 
you Surveyor-General ; you make me Mayor and I'll 



THE CHRISTIANIZED VOTE. 639 

put you on the Water Board ; you give me position 
and I'll give you position." That is the form of the 
bribe often and often in these great cities. So it is 
often the case that by the time a man comes to an 
office to which he has been elected, he is from the 
crown of head to the sole of foot mortgaged with 
pledges, and the man who goes to Albany or to 
Washington to get an office is applying for some 
position which was given away three months before 
the election. Two long lines of worm fence, one 
worm fence reaching to Albany, and the other to 
Washington, and there a great many citizens astride 
the fence, and they are equally poised, and they are 
waiting to see on which side there is most emolu- 
ment, and on this side they get down. But bribery 
kicks both ways. It kicks the man that offers it, and 
the man that takes it. Bribery to-day you will 
admit to be one of the mightiest foes of the Ameri- 
can ballot-box. 

Another great enemy of that sacred chest is def- 
amation of character. 

Can you find out from the newspapers when two 
men are in office, which is the best? How often in 
the autumnal elections the good man is denounced 
and the bad man applauded, so that you can come 
sometimes to no just opinion as to who is the best 
man, and there are hundreds and thousands of elect- 
ors who go up to vote so utterly befogged they know 
not what they do. Is not that a fearful influence to 
be brought upon the ballot-box of this country ? It 
has been so ever since the foundation of this govern- 
ment. Defamation of character. 

Thomas Paine writes Washington a letter, and pub- 
lishes it, saying: " Treacherous in all private friend- 



64O THE CHRISTIANIZED VOTE. 

ship and a hypocrite in public morals, the world will 
be puzzled to know whether we had better call you 
an apostate or an impostor, and whether you aban- 
doned good morals, or never had any." That is 
Thomas Paine's opinion of George Washington. 

John Quincy Adams declared that he was solaced 
in regard to the scandals and anathemas inflicted upon 
him by the fact that his father, John Adams, had to 
go through the same process, and John Quincy 
Adams declared he really thought in that present 
election there were men who gave their entire time 
to manufacturing falsehood in regard to him. Martin 
Van Buren was al wavs pictorialized as a rat. Thomas 
H. Benton and Amos Kendall were always pictorial- 
ized as robbers with battering-rams breaking in the 
door of the United States Bank. 

On the day on which Thomas Jefferson was inau- 
gurated President of the United States, March 4th, 
1 80 1, the following appeared in the Sentinel, of Bos- 
ton : " Monumental inscription. Yesterday expired, 
deeply regretted by millions of grateful Americans, 
and by all good men, the Federal Administration of 
the Government of the United States, animated by 
Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Knox, Pickering, 
McHenry, Marshall and Stoddard ; aged twelve years. 
Its death was occasioned by the secret arts and open 
violence of foreign and domestic demagogues. As 
one tribute of gratitude in these times, this monument 
to the talents and services of the deceased is raised 
by the Sentinel." Under such defamation as that 
Thomas Jefferson went into office. 

My father told me that when Andrew Jackson was 
running for President of the United States, the 
whole land was flooded with coffin handbills — pic- 



THE CHRISTIANIZED VOTE. 641 

tures of six dead men, in allusion to the six deserters 
whom Andrew Jackson had had shot, and all the 
pictorials of those times represented Jackson as tak- 
ing- his office from the hand of the devil. 

I saw a few summers ago at Put-in-Bay, Ohio, in a 
museum, a prominent paper of 1844, which spoke of 
Henry Clay as a gambler, a libertine, and a murderer ; 
and the manner in which he was defamed and the 
outrages which were heaped upon him may be well 
guessed from Mr. Clay's eulogy of his native State, 
Kentucky. He said : " When I seemed to be 
assailed by all the rest of the world, she interposed 
her broad and impenetrable shield, repelled the 
poisoned shafts that were aimed for my destruction, 
and vindicated my good name from every malignant 
and unfounded aspersion." 

Defamation ! It is the curse of the American 
ballot-box. Just as soon as in the great cities a man 
is put up for office he is made the target. The fact 
that he is up is prima facie evidence that he must be 
brought down. His public life, and his private life, 
are scrutinized, aud all the electric lights are turned 
on. How often it is that men have gone down under 
such things. In every autumnal election the air is 
filled with carrion crows scenting carcasses. Caw ! 
Caw ! Caw ! There are newspapers in the United 
States that in the great autumnal elections take wild 
license for liberty. They are filled with calumny. 
The editorial columns of such papers reek with it ; 
their columns are stuffed with it. There are news- 
papers in the United States which, in the great 
popular elections, breakfast, and dine, and sup on 
indecency, They wallow in it. Swine in the mire. 
They give more for one quill of filth than a whole 

4 1 



642 



THE CHRISTIANIZED VOTE. 



hogshead of decent product. There are in these 
great autumnal elections men sitting in editorial 
chairs who write with a quill, not plucked from the 
stupid goose, or the sublime eagle, but from a turkey 
buzzard ! Ghouls ! Ghouls ! They tip the city 
% sewer into their editorial inkstands. Defamation of 
character is one of the curses of the American ballot- 
box to-day. In your great presidential elections who 
can tell from what he reads who is the man he ought 
to vote for ? Bad men sometimes applauded, good 
men denounced. 

Another powerful foe ol the sacred chest, the 
ark of the American covenant, the ballot-box, is the 
rowdy and drunken caucus. 

The ballot-box does not give any choice to a man 
when the nominations are made in the back part of a 
groggery. When the elector comes up he has to 
choose between two evils. In some of the cities men 
have come to the ballot-box to vote, and have found 
both names such a scaly, greasy, and stenchful crew 
they had no choice. You say vote for somebody 
outside. Then they throw away their vote. Chris- 
tian men of New York and Brooklyn, honorable men, 
patriotic men, go and take possession of the caucuses. 
First having saturated your pocket handkerchief with 
cologne or some other disinfectant, go down to the 
caucus and take possession of it in the name of the 
Lord God Almighty and the American people, 
though after you come back you should have to 
hang your hat and coat on a line in the back yard 
for ventilation. 

In some of the States politics have got so low 
that the nominees no more need good morals than 
they do a bath-tub. Snatch the ballot-box from such 



THE CHRISTIANIZED VOTE. 



643 



men. Where is the David who will go forth and 
bring the ark of the covenant back from Kirjath- 
jearim? Do you not think politics have got to a 
pretty low ebb in our day when a Tweed could be 
sent to the Legislature of New York, and a John 
Morrissey, the prince of gamblers, could be sent to 
the American Congress ? 

Now, how are these things to be remedied ? Some 
say by a property qualification. They say that after 
a man gets a certain amount of property — a certain 
amount of real estate — he is financially interested in 
good government, and he becomes cautious and con- 
servative. I reply, a property qualification would 
shut off from the ballot-box a great many of the best 
men in this land. Literary men are almost always 
poor. A pen is a good implement to make the world 
better, but it is a very poor implement to get a live- 
lihood ordinarily. I have known scores of literary 
men who never owned a foot of ground, and never 
will own a foot of ground until they get under it. 
Professors of colleges, teachers of schools, editors of 
newspapers, ministers of religion, qualified in every 
possible way to vote, yet no worldly success. There 
has been many a man who has not had a house on 
earth who will have a mansion in heaven. 

There are many who, through accidents of fortune, 
have come to great success while they are profound 
in their stupidity, as profound in their stupidity as a 
man of large fortune with whom I was crossing the 
ocean, who told me he was going to see the dykes of 
Scotland ! When a member of my family asked a 
lady, on her return from Europe, if she had seen 
Mont Blanc, she replied : " Well, really, I don't 
know ; is that in Europe ?" Ignorance by the square 



644 



THE CHRISTIANIZED VOTE. 



foot. Property qualification will not do. The only- 
way these evils will be eradicated, will be by more 
thorough legal defence of the ballot-box and a more 
thorough moralization and Christianization of the 
people. That ark of the covenant was carried into 
captivity to Kirjath-jearim, but one day the people 
hooked oxen to a cart, and they put this ark on the 
cart, and the cart was taken to Jersualem — the ark of 
the covenant coming with the shouting and thanks- 
giving of the people. And though the American 
ballot-box, the ark of the American covenant, our 
sacred chest, has been carried again and again into 
captivity by fraud and iniquity and spurious voting, 
I believe it will be brought back yet by prayer and 
by Christian consecration, and will be set down in 
the midst of the temple of Christian patriotism. 
Whose responsibility ? Yours and mine. 



CHAPTER LXIII. 



CAPITAL AND LABOR. 

" Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so 
to them." — Matt. 7: 12. 

The greatest war the world has ever seen is 
between capital and labor. The strife is not like that 
which in history is called the Thirty Years' War, 
for it is a war of centuries, it is a war of five conti- 
nents, it is a war hemispheric. The middle classes 
in this country, upon whom the nation has depended 
for holding the balance of power and for acting as 
mediators between the two extremes, are diminish- 
ing, and if things go on at the same ratio as they are 
now going, it will not be very long before there will 
be no middle class in this country, but all will be very 
rich or very poor, princes or paupers, and the coun- 
try will be given up to palaces and hovels. The 
antagonistic forces are closing in upon each other. 
The telegraphic operators' strikes, the railroad em- 
ployes' strikes, the Pennsylvania miners' strikes, the 
movements of the boycotters and the dynamiters are 
only skirmishes before a general engagement, or, if 
you prefer it, escapes through the safety-valves of an 
imprisoned force which promises the explosion of 
society. You may pooh-pooh it ; you may say that 
this trouble, like an angry child, will cry itself to 
sleep ; you may belittle it by calling it Fourierism, 
or Socialism, or St. Simonism, or Nihilism, or Com- 

645 



646 



CAPITAL AND LABOR. 



munism ; but that will not hinder the fact that it is 
the mightiest, the darkest, the most terrific threat of 
this century. 

All attempts at pacification have been dead failures, 
and monopoly is more arrogant, and the trades-unions 
more bitter. " Give us more wages," cry the em- 
ployes. " You shall have less," say the capitalists. 
" Compel us to do fewer hours of toil in a day." 
" You shall toil more hours," say the others. " Then, 
under certain conditions, we will not work at all," 
say these. " Then you shall starve," say those, and 
the workmen gradually using up that which they ac- 
cumulated in better times, unless there be some 
radical change, we shall have soon in this country 
three million hungry men and women. Now three 
million hungry people cannot be kept quiet. All the 
enactments of legislatures and all the constabularies 
of the cities, and all the army and navy of the United 
States, cannot keep three million hungry people 
quiet. What then? Will this war between capital 
and labor be settled by human wisdom? Never! 
The brow of the one becomes more rigid, the fist of 
the other more clenched. 

But that which human wisdom cannot achieve will 
be accomplished by Christianity if it be given full 
sway. You have heard of medicines so powerful 
that one drop would stop a disease and restore a 
patient ; and I have to tell you that one drop of my 
text properly administered will stop all these woes of 
society and give convalescence and complete health 
to all classes. " Whatsoever ye would that men 
should do to you, do ye even so to them." 

I shall first show you how this quarrel between 
monopoly and hard work cannot be stopped, and 



CAPITAL AND LABOR. 647 

then I will show you how this controversy will be 
settled. 

In the first place, there will come no pacification to 
this trouble through an outcry against rich men merely 
because they are rich. There is no member of a trades- 
union on earth that would not be rich if he could be. 
Sometimes through a fortunate invention, or through 
some accident of prosperity, a man who had nothing 
comes to large estate, and we see him arrogant and 
supercilious, and taking people by the throat just as 
other people took him by the throat. There is some- 
thing very mean about human nature when it comes 
to the top. But it is no more a sin to be rich than it 
is a sin to be poor. There are those who have 
gathered great estate through fraud, and then there 
are millionaires who have gathered their fortune 
through foresight in regard to changes in the 
markets, and through brilliant business faculty, and 
every dollar of their estate is as honest as the dollar 
which the plumber gets for mending a pipe, or the 
mason gets for building a wall. There are those who 
are kept in poverty because of their own fault. They 
might have been well off, but they smoked or chewed 
up their earnings, or they lived beyond their means, 
while others on the same wages and on the same 
salaries went on to competency. I know a man who 
is all the time complaining of his poverty and crying 
out against rich men, while he himself keeps two 
dogs, and chews and smokes, and is filled to the chin 
with whisky and beer! 

Micawber said to David Copperfield: "Copper- 
field, my boy, one pound income, twenty shillings 
and sixpence expenses ; result, misery. But, Copper- 
field, my boy, one pound income, expenses nineteen 



648 



CAPITAL AND LABOR. * 



shillings and sixpence ; result, happiness." And there 
are vast multitudes of people who are kept poor be- 
cause they are the victims of their own improvidence. 
It is no sin to be rich, and it is no sin to be poor. I 
protest against this outcry which I hear against those 
who, through economy, and self-denial, and assiduity, 
have come to large fortune. This bombardment 
of commercial success will never stop this quarrel 
between capital and labor. 

Neither will the contest be settled by cynical and 
unsympathetic treatment of the laboring classes. 
There are those who speak of them as though they 
were only cattle or draught horses. Their nerves 
are nothing, their domestic comfort is nothing, their 
happiness is nothing. They have no more sympathy 
for them than a hound has for a hare, or a hawk for 
a hen, or a tiger for a calf. When Jean Valjean, the 
greatest hero of Victor Hugo's writings, after a life 
of suffering and brave endurance, goes into incarce- 
ration and death, they clap the book shut, and say : 
"Good for him !" They stamp their feet with indig- 
nation and say just the opposite of "Save the work- 
ing classes." They have all their sympathies with 
Shylock, and not with Antonio and Portia. They 
are plutocrats, and their feelings are infernal. They 
are filled with irritation and irascibility on this sub- 
ject. To stop this awful embroglio between capital 
and labor they will lift not so much as the tip end of 
the little finger. 

Neither will there be any pacification of this angry 
controversy through violence. God never blessed 
murder. The poorest use you can put a man to is to 
kill him. Blow up to-morrow all the country-seats on 
the banks of the Hudson, and all the fine houses on 



CAPITAL AND LABOR. 649 

Madison Square, and Brooklyn Heights, and Bunker 
Hill, and Rittenhouse Square, and Beacon Street, and 
all the bricks and timber and stone will just fall back 
on the bare head of American labor. The worst 
enemies of the working classes in the United States 
and Ireland are their demented coadjutors. Assas- 
sination — the assassination of Lord Frederick Caven- 
dish and Mr. Burke in Phoenix Park, Dublin, Ireland, 
in the attempt to avenge the wrongs of Ireland, only 
turned away from that afflicted people millions of 
sympathizers. The recent attempt to blow up the 
House of Commons, in London, had only this effect : 
to throw out of employment tens of thousands of in- 
nocent Irish people in England. 

In this country the torch put to factories that have 
discharged hands for good or bad reason ; obstruc- 
tions on the rail-track in front of midnight express 
trains because the offenders do not like the president 
of the company ; strikes on shipboard the hour they 
were going to sail, or in printing-offices the hour the 
paper was to go to press, or in mines the day the coal 
was to be delivered, or on house scaffoldings so the 
builder fails in keeping his contract — all these are 
only a hard blow on the head of American labor, and 
cripple its arms, and lame its feet, and pierce its 
heart. Take the last great strike in America — the 
telegraph operators' strike — and you have to find 
that the operators lost four hundred thousand dol- 
lars' worth of wages, and have had poorer wages 
ever since. Traps sprung suddenly upon employers, 
and violence, never took one knot out of the knuckle 
of toil, or put one farthing of wages into a callous 
palm. Barbarism will never cure the wrongs of 
civilization. Mark that ! 



650 CAPITAL AND LABOR. 

The most imperious outrage against the poor and 
against the working classes will yet cower before the 
law. Violence and contrary to the law will never 
accomplish anything, but righteousness and accord- 
ing to law, will accomplish it. 

Well, if this controversy between Capital and La- 
bor cannot be settled by human wisdom, if to-day 
Capital and Labor stand with their thumbs on each 
other's throat — as they do — it is time for us to look 
somewhere else for relief, and it points from my text 
roseate and jubilant, and puts one hand on the broad- 
cloth shoulder of Capital, and puts the other hand on 
the homespun-covered shoulder of Toil, and says^ 
with a voice that will grandly and gloriously settle 
this, and settle everything, " Whatsoever ye would 
that men should do to you, do ye even so to them." 
That is, the lady of the household will say : " I must 
treat the maid in the kitchen just as I would like to 
be treated if I were downstairs and it were my work 
to wash, and cook, and sweep, and it were the duty 
of the maid in the kitchen to preside in this parlor." 
The maid in the kitchen must say : " If my employer 
seems to be more prosperous than I, that is no fault 
of hers; I shall not treat her as an enemy. I will 
have the same industry and fidelity downstairs as I 
would expect from my subordinates if I happened to 
be the wife of a silk importer." 

The owner of an iron mill, having taken a dose of 
my text before leaving home in the morning, will go 
into his foundry and, passing into what is called the 
puddling-room, he will see a man there stripped to 
the waist, and besweated and exhausted with the 
labor and the toil, and he will say to him : " Why, it 
seems to be very hot in here. You look very much 



CAPITAL AND LABOR. 



6 5 I 



exhausted. I hear your child is very sick with scar- 
let fever. If you want your wages a little earlier 
this week, so as to pay the nurse and get. the medi- 
cines, just come into my office any time." 

After awhile, crash goes the money-market, and 
there is no more demand for the articles manufact- 
■ ured in that iron-mill, and the owner does not know 
what to do. He says, " Shall I stop the mill, or shall 
I run it on half-time, or shall I cut down the men's 
wages?" He walks the floor of his counting-room 
all day, hardly knowing what to do. Toward eve- 
ning he calls all the laborers together. They stand 
all around, some with arms akimbo, some with folded 
arms, wondering what the boss is going to do now. 
The manufacturer says, " Men, times are very hard ; 
I don't make twenty dollars where I used to make 
one hundred. Somehow, there is no demand now 
for what we manufacture, or but very little demand. 
You see I am at vast expense, and I have called you 
together this afternoon to see what you would advise. 
I don't want to shut up the mill, because that would 
force you out of work, and you have always been 
very faithful, and I like you, and you seem to like 
me, and the bairns must be looked after, and your 
wife will after a while want a new dress. I don't 
know what to do." 

There is a dead halt for a minute or two, and then 
one of the workmen steps out from the ranks of his 
fellows, and says : " Boss, you have been very good 
to us, and when you prospered we prospered, and 
now you are in a tight place and I am sorry, and we 
have got to sympathize with you. I don't know 7 
how the others feel, but I propose that we take off 
twenty per cent, from our wages, and then when the 



652 



CAPITAL AND LABOR. 



times get good you will remember us and raise them 
again." The workman looks around to his com- 
rades, and says : " Boys, what do you say to this? 
All in favor of my proposition will say aye." " Aye ! 
aye! aye ! " shout two hundred voices. 

But the mill owner, getting in some new ma- 
chinery, exposes himself very much, and takes cold, 
and it settles into pneumonia, and he dies. In the 
procession to the tomb are all the workmen, tears 
rolling down their cheeks, and off upon the ground ; 
but an hour before the procession gets to the ceme- 
tery the wives and the children of these workmen 
are at the grave waiting for the arrival of the funeral 
pageant. The minister of religion may have deliv- 
ered an eloquent eulogium before they started from 
the house, but the most impressive things are said 
that day by the working-classes standing around the 
tomb. 

That night in all the cabins of the working-people 
where they have family prayers the widowhood and 
the orphanage in the mansion are remembered. No 
glaring populations look over the iron fence of the 
cemetery ; but, hovering over the scene, the benedic- 
tion of God and man is coming from the fulfilment of 
the Christlike injunction, " Whatsoever ye would 
that men should do to you, do ye even so to them." 

" Oh," says some man here, " that is all Utopian, 
that is apocryphal, that is impossible." No. Yester- 
day I cut out of a paper this : " One of the pleasant- 
est incidents recorded in a long time is reported from 
Sheffield, England. The wages of the men in the 
iron works at Sheffield are regulated by a board of 
arbitration, by whose decision both masters and men 
are bound. For some time past the iron and steel 



CAPITAL AND LABOR. 653 

trade has been extremely unprofitable, and the em- 
ployers can not, without much loss, pay the wages 
fixed by the board, which neither employers nor 
employed have the power to change. To avoid this 
difficulty, the workmen in one of the largest steel 
works in Sheffield hit upon a device as rare as it was 
generous. They offered to work for their employers 
one week without any pay whatever. How much 
better that plan is than a strike would be." 

But you go with me and I will show you — not 
so far off as Sheffield, England — factories, banking- 
houses, storehouses, and costly enterprises where 
this Christ-like injunction of my text is fully kept, 
and you could no more get the employer to practice 
an injustice upon his men, or the men to conspire 
against the employer, than you could get your right 
hand and your left hand, your right eye and your left 
eye, your right ear and your left ear, into physiolog- 
ical antagonism. Now, where is this to begin? In 
our homes, in our stores, on our farms — not waiting 
for other people to do their duty. Is there a diverg- 
ence now between the parlor and the kitchen ? Then 
there is something wrong, either in the parlor or the 
kitchen, perhaps in both. Are the clerks in your store 
irate against the firm ? Then there is something 
wrong, either behind the counter, or in the private 
office, or perhaps in both. 

The great want of the world to-day is the fulfil- 
ment of this Christ-like injunction, that which He 
promulgated in His sermon Olivetic. All the polit- 
ical economists under the arch or vault of the heav- 
ens in convention for a thousand years cannot settle 
this controversy between monopoly and hard work, 
between capital and labor. 



654 



CAPITAL AND LABOR. 



During the Revolutionary war there was a heavy 
piece of timber to be lifted, perhaps for some fortress, 
and a corporal was overseeing the work, and he was 
giving commands to some soldiers as they lifted : 
" Heave away there ! yo heave ! " Well, the timber 
was too heavy ; they could not get it up. There was 
a gentleman riding by on a horse, and he stopped, 
and said to this corporal, " Why don't you help them 
lift? That timber is too heavy for them to lift." 
" No," he said, '" I won't ; I am a corporal." The 
gentleman got off his horse, and came up to the 
place. " Now," he said to the soldiers, " all together 
— yo heave ! " and the timber went to its place. 
" Now," said the gentleman to the corporal, " when 
you have a piece of timber too heavy for the men to 
lift, and you want help, you send to your commander- 
in-chief." It was Washington. Now, that is about all 
the Gospel I know — the Gospel of giving somebody 
a lift, a lift out of darkness, a lift out of earth into 
heaven. 

"Oh," says some wiseacre ; "talk as you will, the 
law of demand and supply will regulate these things 
until the end of time." No, they will not, unless 
God dies and the batteries of the Judgment Day are 
spiked, and Pluto and Proserpine, king and queen of 
the infernal regions, take full possession of this world. 
Do you know who Supply and Demand are ? They 
have gone into partnership, and they propose to 
swindle this earth, and are swindling it. You are 
drowning. Supply and Demand stand on the shore, 
one on one side, the other on the other side of the 
life-boat, and they cry out to you : "Now, you pay 
us what we ask you for getting you to shore, or go 
to the bottom !" If you can borrow $5,000 you can 



CAPITAL AND LABOR. 



655 



keep from failing in business. Supply and Demand 
say : "Now, you pay us exorbitant usury, or you 
go into bankruptcy." This robber firm of Supply 
and Demand say to you : "The crops are short. 
We bought up all the wheat and it is in our bin. 
Now, you pay our price or starve." That is your 
magnificent law of supply and demand. 

Supply and Demand own the largest mill on earth, 
and all the rivers roll over their wheel, and into their 
hopper they put all the men, women and children 
they can shovel out of the centuries, and the blood 
and the bones redden the valley while the mill grinds. 
That diabolic law of supply and demand will yet have 
to stand aside, and instead thereof will come the law 
of love, the law of co-operation, the law of kindness, 
the law of sympathy, the law of Christ. 

Have you no idea of the coming of such a time? 
Then you do not believe the Bible. All the Bible is 
full of promises on this subject, and as the ages roll 
on the time will come when men of fortune will be 
giving larger sums to humanitarian and evangelistic 
purposes, and there will be more James Lenoxes and 
Peter Coopers, and William E. Dodges, and George 
Peabodys. As that time comes there will be more 
parks, more picture-galleries, more gardens thrown 
open for the holiday people and the working-classes. 

I was reading only this morning, in regard to a 
charge that had been made in England against Lam- 
beth Palace that it was exclusive, and that charge 
demonstrated the sublime fact that to the grounds of 
that wealthy estate eight hundred poor families have 
free passes, and forty croquet companies and on the 
half-day-holidays four thousand poor people recline 
on the grass, walk through the paths, and sit under the 



656 CAPITAL AND LABOR. 

trees. That is Gospel — Gospel on the wing, Gospel 
out of doors worth just as much as indoors. That 
time is going to come. 

That is only a hint of what is going to be. The 
time is going to come when, if you have anything in 
your house worth looking at — pictures, pieces of 
sculpture — you are going to invite me to come and 
see it, you are going to invite my friends to come and 
see it, and you will say, " See what I have been blessed 
with. God has given me this, and so far as enjoying 
it, it is yours also." That is Gospel. 

In crossing the Alleghany Mountains many years 
ago the stage halted, and Henry Clay dismounted 
from the stage, and went out on a rock at the very 
verge of the cliff, and he stood there with his cloak 
wrapped around him, and he seemed to be listening 
for something. Some one said to him, " What are 
you listening for ? " Standing there on the top of 
the mountain, he said : " I am listening to the tramp 
of the footsteps of the coming millions of this con- 
tinent." 

A sublime posture for an American statesman. 
You and I to-day stand on the mountain top of 
privilege, and on the Rock of Ages, and we look off, 
and we hear coming from the future the happy in- 
dustries, and the smiling populations, and the conse- 
crated fortunes, and the innumerable prosperities of 
the closing nineteenth and the opening twentieth 
centuries. 

The greatest friend of capitalist and toiler, and the 
one who will yet bring them together in complete 
accord, was born one Christmas night while the cur- 
tains of heaven swung, stirred by the wings angelic. 
Owner of all things — all the continents, all worlds, 



CAPITAL AND LABOR. 



657 



and all the islands of light. Capitalist of immensity, 
crossing over to our condition. Coming into our 
world, not by gate of palace, but by door of barn. 
Spending His first night amid the shepherds. Gath- 
ering after around Him the fishermen to be His chief 
attendants. With adze, and saw, and chisel, and axe, 
and in a carpenter-shop showing himself brother with 
the tradesmen. Owner of all things, and yet on a 
hillock back of Jerusalem one day resigning every- 
thing for others, keeping not so much as a shekel to 
pay for His obsequies, by charity buried in the sub- 
urbs of a city that had cast Him out. Before the 
cross of such a capitalist, and such a carpenter, all 
men can afford to shake hands, and worship. Here is 
the every man's Christ. None so high but He was 
higher. None so poor but He was poorer. At His 
feet the hostile extremes will yet renounce their ani- 
mosities, and countenances which have glowered 
with the prejudices and revenge of centuries shall 
brighten with the smile of heaven as He commands : 
" Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, 
do ye even so to them." 



CHAPTER LXIV. 

MORAL CHARACTER OF CANDIDATES. 

The lightnings and earthquakes united their forces 
to wreck a mountain of Arabia Petrasa in olden time, 
and travelers to-day find heaps of porphyry and 
greenstone rocks, bowlder against bowlder, the re- 
mains of the first law library, written, not on parch- 
ment or papyrus, but on shattered slabs of granite. 
The corner-stones of all morality, of all wise law, of 
all righteous jurisprudence, of all good government, 
are the two tablets of stone on which were written 
the Ten Commandments. All Roman law, all French 
law, all English law, all American law that is worth 
anything, all common law, civil law, criminal law, 
martial law, law of nations, were rocked in the cradle 
of the twentieth chapter of Exodus. And it would 
be well in these times of great political agitation if 
the newspapers would print the Decalogue some day 
in place of the able editorial. 

These laws are the pillars of society, and if you re- 
move one pillar you damage the whole structure. I 
have noticed that men are particularly vehement 
against sins to which they are not particularly 
tempted, and find no especial wrath against sins in 
which they themselves indulge. They take out one 
gun from this battery of ten guns, and load that, and 
unlimber that, and fire that. They say, " This is an 
Armstrong gun, and this is a Krupp gun, and this is 

658 



MORAL CHARACTER OF CANDIDATES. 659 

a Nordensfeld five-barreled gun, and this is a Gatling 
ten-barreled gun, and this is a Martigny thirty-seven 
barreled gun." But I have to tell them that they are 
all of the same calibre, and that they shoot from eter- 
nity to eternity. 

The Decalogue forbids idolatr}% image making, 
profanity, maltreatment of parents, Sabbath desecra- 
tion, murder, theft, incontinence, lying, and covetous- 
ness. This is the Decalogue by which you and I will 
have to be tried, and by that same Decalogue you and 
I must try candidates for office. 

Of course we shall not find anything like perfec- 
tion. If we do not vote until we find an immaculate 
nominee we will never vote at all. We have so many 
faults of our own w r e ought not to be censorious or 
maledictory or hypercritical in regard to the faults 
of others. 

The Christly rule is as appropriate for November 
as any other month in the year, and for the fourth 
year as for the three preceding years: "Judge not 
that ye be not judged, for with what measure ye mete 
it shall be measured to you again." 

Most certainly are we not to take the statement of 
red-hot partisanship as the real character of any man. 
From nearly all of the great cities of this land I re- 
ceive daily or weekly newspapers, sent to me regu- 
larly and in compliment, so I see both sides — I see all 
s id es — an d it is most entertaining, and my regular 
amusement, to read the opposite statements. The 
one statement says the man is an angel, and the other 
says he is a devil ; and I split the difference, and I 
find him half way between. There has never been 
an honest or respectable man running for the United 
States Presidency since the foundation of the Amer- 



66o MORAL CHARACTER OF CANDIDATES. 



ican government, if we may believe the old files of 
newspapers in the museums. What a mercy it is 
that they were not all hung before inauguration day. 

I warn you also against the mistake which many 
are making, and always do make, of applying a dif- 
ferent standard of character for those in high place 
and of large means, from the standard they apply for 
ordinary persons. However much a man may have, 
and however high the position he gets, he has no 
especial liberty given him in the interpretation of the 
Ten Commandments. A great sinner is no more to 
be excused than a small sinner. Do not charge illus- 
trious defection to eccentricity, or chop off the Ten 
Commandments to suit especial cases. The right is 
everlastingly right, and the wrong is everlastingly 
wrong. If any man nominated for any office in this 
city, State or nation differs from the Decalogue, do 
not fix up the Decalogue, but fix him up. This law 
must stand, whatever else may fall. 

I call your attention also to the fact that you are 
all aware of, that the breaking of one commandment 
makes it the more easy to break all of them, and the 
philosophy is plain. Any kind of sin weakens the 
conscience, and if the conscience is weakened, that 
opens the door for all kinds of transgression. If, for 
instance, a man go into this political campaign wield- 
ing scurrility as his chief weapon, and he believes 
everything bad about a man, and believes nothing 
good, how long before that man himself will get over 
the moral depression ? Neither in time nor eternity. 
If I utter a falsehood in regard to a man I may dam- 
age him, but I get for myself tenfold more damage. 
That is a gun that kicks. 

If, for instance, a man be profane, under provo- 



MORAL CHARACTER OF CANDIDATES. 66 1 

cation he will commit any crime. I say under provo- 
cation. For if a man will maltreat the Lord Almighty, 
would he not maltreat his fellow-man ? If a man be 
guilty of malfeasance in office, he will, under provo- 
cation, commit any sin. He who will steal, will lie, 
and he who will lie, will steal. 

If, for instance, a man be unchaste, it opens the 
door for all other iniquity, for in that one iniquity he 
commits theft of the worst kind, and covetousness of 
the worst kind, and falsehood — pretending to be de- 
cent when he is not — and maltreats his parents by dis- 
gracing their name, if they were good. Be careful, 
therefore, how you charge that sin against any man 
either in high or low place, either in office or out of 
office, because when you make that charge against a 
man you charge him with all villainies, with all dis- 
gusting propensities, with all rottenness. 

A libertine is a beast, lower than the vermin that 
crawl over a summer carcass — lower than the swine, 
for the swine has no intelligence to sin against. Be 
careful, then, how you charge that against any man. 
You must be so certain that a mathematical demon- 
stration is doubtful as compared with it. 

And, then, when you investigate a man on such 
subjects, you must go the whole length of investiga- 
tion, and find out whether or not he has repented. 
He may have been down on his knees before God 
and implored the divine forgiveness, and he may have 
implored the forgiveness of society and the forgive- 
ness of the world ; although if a man commit that 
sin at thirty or thirty-five years of age there is not 
one case out of a thousand where he ever repents. 
You must in your investigation see if it is possible 
that the one case investigated may not have been the 



662 MORAL CHARACTER OF CANDIDATES. 

glorious exception. But do not chop off the seventh 
commandment to suit the case. Do not change Fair- 
banks' scale to suit what you are weighing with it. 
Do not cut off a yardstick to suit the dry goods you 
are measuring. Let the law stand and never tamper 
with it. 

Above all, I charge you do not join in the cry that 
I have heard — for fifteen, twenty years I have heard 
it — that there is no such thing as purity. If you make 
that charge you are a foul-mouthed scandalizer of the 
human race. You are a leper. Make room for that 
leper ! When a man, by pen, or type or tongue, ut- 
ters such a slander on the human race that there is no 
such thing as purity, 1 know right away that that 
man himself is a walking lazaretto, a reeking ulcer, 
and is fit for no society better than that of devils 
damned. We may enlarge our charities in such a 
case, but in no such case let us shave off the Ten 
Commandments. Let them stand as the everlasting 
defence of society and of the Church of God. 

The committing of one sin opens the door for the 
commission of other sins. You see it every day. 
Those Wall Street embezzlers, those bank cashiers 
absconding as soon as they are brought to justice, 
develop the fact that they were in all kinds of sin. 
No exception to the rule. They all kept bad com- 
pany, they nearly all gamble, they all went to places 
where they ought not. Why? The commission of 
the one sin opened the gate for all the other sins. 
Sins go in flocks, in droves, and in herds. You open 
the door for one sin, that invites in all the miserable 
segregation. The campaign orators, some of them, 
bombarding the suffering candidates all the week, 
think no wrong in riding all Sunday, and they are 



MORAL CHARACTER OF CANDIDATES. 663 

at this moment, many of them, in the political head- 
quarters calculating the chances. All the week hurl- 
ing the eighth commandment at Mr. Blaine, the 
seventh commandment at Mr. Cleveland, and the 
ninth commandment at Mr. St. John — what are they 
doing with the fourth commandment ? " Remember 
the Sabbath day to keep it holy." Breaking it. Is 
not the fourth commandment as important as the 
eighth, as the seventh, as the ninth ? Some of these 
political campaign orators, as I have seen them re- 
ported, and as I have heard in regard to them, bom- 
barding the suffering candidates all the week, yet 
tossing the name of God from their lips recklessly, 
guilty of profanity. What are they doing with the 
third commandment ? Is not the third command- 
ment, which says: " Thou shalt not take the name 
of the Lord thy God in vain, for the Lord will not 
hold him guiltless that taketh His name in vain" — is 
not the third commandment as important as the 
other seven ? Oh yes, we find in all departments 
men are hurling their indignation against sins per- 
haps to which they are not especially tempted — 
hurling it against iniquity toward which they are not 
particularly drawn. 

I have this book for my authority when I say that 
the man who swears, or the man who breaks the 
Sabbath is as culpable before God as either of those 
candidates is culpable if the things charged on him 
are true. What right have you and I to select which 
commandment we will keep, and which we will 
break ? Better not try to measure the thunderbolts 
of the Almighty, saying this has less blaze, this has 
less momentum. Better not handle the guns, better 
not experiment much with the divine ammunition. 



664 MORAL CHARACTER OF CANDIDATES. 

Cicero said he saw the Iliad written on a nut-shell, 
and you and I have seen the Lord's Prayer written 
on a five-cent piece ; but the whole tendency of these 
times is to write the Ten Commandments so small 
nobody can see them. I protest this day against the 
attempt to revise the Decalogue which was given on 
Mount Sinai, amid the blast of trumpets, and the 
cracking of the rocks, and the paroxysm of the moun- 
tain of Arabia Petrasa. 

I bring up the candidates for city, State, and 
national power — I bring them up, and I try them by 
this Decalogue. Of course they are imperfect. We 
are all imperfect. 

We say things we ought not to say, we do things 
we ought not to do. We have all been wrong, we 
have all done wrong. But I shall find out one of the 
candidates who comes, in my estimation, nearest to 
obedience of the Ten Commandments, and I will 
vote for him, and you will vote for him unless you 
love God less than your party ; then you will not. 



CHAPTER LXV. 



RULERS. 

The morals of a nation seldom rise higher than the 
virtue of the rulers. Henry VIII. makes impurity 
popular and national. William Wilberforce gives 
moral tone to a whole empire. Sin bestarred and 
epauletted makes crime respectable and brings it to 
canonization. Malarias arise from the swamp and 
float upward, but moral distempers descend from the 
mountain to the plain. The slums only disgust men 
with the bestiality of crime, but dissolute French 
court or corrupt congressional delegation puts a pre- 
mium upon iniquity. Many of the sins of the world 
are only royal exiles. They had a throne once, but 
they have been turned out, and they come down 
now to be entertained by the humble and the insig- 
nificant. 

There is not a land on earth which has so many 
moral men in authority as this land. There is not a 
session of legislature, or Congress, or cabinet, but in 
it are thoroughly Christian men, men whose hands 
would consume a bribe, whose cheek has never been 
flushed with intoxication, whose tongue has never 
been smitten of blasphemy, or stung of a lie ; men 
whose speeches in behalf of the right and against the 
wrong remind us of the old Scotch Covenanters, and 
the defiant challenge of Martin Luther, and the red 
lightning of Micah and Habakkuk. These times are 

665 



666 



RULERS. 



not half as bad as the times that are gone. I judge 
so from the fact that Aaron Burr, a man stuffed with 
iniquity until he could hold no more, the debaucher 
of the debauched, was a member of the Legislature, 
then Attorney-General, then a Senator of the United 
Sates, then Vice-President, and then at last coming 
within one vote of the highest position in this nation. 
I judge it from the fact that more than a half century 
ago the Governor of this State disbanded the Legis- 
lature of New York because it was too corrupt to sit 
in council. 

There is a tendency in our time to extol the past to 
the disadvantage of the present, and I suppose that 
sixty years from now there may be persons who will 
represent some of us as angels, although now things 
are so unpromising. But the iniquity of the past is 
no excuse for the public wickedness of to-day, and so 
I unroll the scroll in the presence of this assemblage. 
Those who are in editorial chairs and in pulpits may 
not hold back the truth. King David must be made 
to feel the reproof of Nathan, and Felix must tremble 
before Paul, and we may not walk with muffled feet 
lest we wake up some big sinner. If we keep back 
the truth, what will we do in the day when the Lord 
rises up in judgment, and we are tried not only for 
what we have said, but for what we have declined to 
say ? 

In unrolling the scroll of public wickedness, I first 
find incompetency for office. 

If a man struggle for an official position for which 
he has no qualification, and win that position, he com- 
mits a crime against God and against society. It is 
no sin for me to be ignorant of medical science ; but 
if ignorant of medical science I set myself up among 



RULERS. 667 

professional men, and trifle with the lives of people, 
then the charlatanism becomes positive knavery. It 
is no sin for me to be ignorant of machinery ; but if, 
knowing nothing about it I attempt to take a steamer 
across to Southampton and through darkness and 
storm I hold the lives of hundreds of passengers, 
then all who are slain by that shipwreck may hold me 
accountable. But what shall f say of those who at- 
tempt to doctor our institutions without qualification, 
and who attempt to engineer our political affairs 
across the rough and stormy sea, having no quali- 
fication ? 

We had at one time in the Congress of the United 
States men who put one tariff upon linseed oil, and 
another tariff upon flaxseed oil, not knowing that 
they were the same thing. We have had men in our 
legislatures who knew not whether to vote aye or no 
until they had seen the wink of the leader. Polished 
civilians acquainted with all our institutions run over 
in a stampede for office by men who have not the 
first qualification. And so there have been school 
commissioners sometimes nominated in grog-shops, 
and hurrahed for by the rabble, the men elected not 
able to read their own commissions. And judges of 
courts who have given sentence to criminals in such 
inaccuracy of phraseology, that the criminal at the 
bar has been more amused at the stupidity of the 
bench than alarmed at the prospect of his own pun- 
ishment. I arraign incompetency for office as one of 
the great crimes of this day in public places. 

I unroll still further the scroll of public wickedness, 
and I come to intemperance. 

There has been a great improvement in this direc- 
tion. The senators who were more celebrated for 



668 



RULERS. 



their drunkenness than their statesmanship are dead, 
or compelled to stay at home. You and I very well 
remember that there went from the State of New 
York at one time, and from the State of Delaware, 
and from the State of Illinois, and from other States, 
men who were notorious everywhere as inebriates. 
That day is past. The grog-shop under the national 
Capitol to which our rulers used to go to get inspira- 
tion before they spoke upon the great moral and finan- 
cial and commercial interests of the country, has 
been disbanded. But I am told even now under the 
national Capitol there are places where our rulers can 
get some very strong lemonade. But there has been 
a vast improvement. At one time I went to Wash- 
ington, to the door of the House of Representatives, 
and sent in my card to an old friend. I had not seen 
him for many years, and the last time I saw him he 
was conspicuous for his .integrity and uprightness; 
but that day when he came out to greet me he was 
staggering drunk. 

The temptation to intemperance in public places 
is simply terrific. How often there have beeu men in 
public places who have disgraced the nation. Of 
the men who were prominent in political circles 
twenty-five or thirty years ago, how few died re- 
spectable deaths. Those who died of delirium 
tremens or kindred diseases were in the majority. 
The doctor fixed up the case very well, and in his 
report of it said it was gout, or it was rheumatism, 
or it was obstruction of the liver, or it was exhaus- 
tion from patriotic services ; but God knew and we 
all knew, it was whiskey ! That which smote the 
villain in the dark alley smote down the great orator 
and the great legislator. The one you wrapped in 



RULERS. 669 

a rough cloth, and pushed into a rough coffin, and 
carried out in a box wagon, and let him down into a 
pauper's grave without a prayer or a benediction. 
Around the other gathered the pomp of the land ; 
and lordly men walked with uncovered heads beside 
the hearse tossing with plumes on the way to a 
grave to be adorned with a white marble shaft, all 
four sides covered with eulogium. The one man was 
killed by logwood rum at two cents a glass, the other 
by a beverage three dollars a bottle. I write both 
their epitaphs. I write the one epitaph with my 
lead-pencil on the shingle over the pauper's grave ; I 
write the other epitaph with chisel, cutting on the 
white marble of the senator : " Slain by strong 
drink." 

You know as well as I that again and again dissi- 
pation has been no hindrance to office in this coun- 
try. Did we not at one time have a Secretary of the 
United States carried home dead drunk? Did we 
not have a Vice-President sworn in so intoxicated 
the whole land hid its head in shame ? Have we not 
in other times had men in the Congress of the nation 
by day making pleas in behalf of the interests of the 
country, and by night illustrating what Solomon said 
" He goeth after her straightway as an ox to the 
slaughter, and as a fool to the correction of the 
stocks, until a dart strikes through his liver." Judges 
and jurors and attorneys sometimes trying important 
causes by day, and by night carousing together in 
iniquity. 

What was it that defeated the armies sometimes in 
the last war? Drunkenness in the saddle. What 
mean those graves on the heights of Fredericksburg? 
As you go to Richmond you see them. Drunken- 



6yo RULERS. 

ness in the saddle. So again and again in the courts 
we have had demonstration of the fact that impurity 
walks under the chandeliers of the mansion and 
drowses on damask upholstery. Iniquity permitted 
to run unchallenged if it only be affluent. Stand 
back and let this libertine ride past in his five-thou- 
sand-dollar equipage, but clutch by the neck that poor 
sinner who transgresses on a small scale, and fetch 
him up to the police court, and give him a ride in the 
city van. Down with small villainy ! Hurrah for 
grand iniquity ! 

If you have not noticed that intemperance is one 
of the crimes in public place to-day, you have not 
been to Albany, and you have not been to Harris- 
burg, and you have not been to Trenton, and you 
have not been to Washington. The whole land cries 
out against the iniquity. But the two political par- 
ties are silent lest they lose votes, and many of the 
newspapers are silent lest they lose subscribers, and 
many of the pulpits are silent because there are 
offenders in the pews.' Meanwhile God's indignation 
gathers like the flashings around a threatening cloud 
just before the swoop of a tornado. The whole land 
cries out to be delivered. The nation sweats great 
drops of blood. It is crucified, not between two 
thieves, but between a thousand, while nations pass 
by wagging their heads, and saying : " Aha ! aha ! " 

I unroll the scroll of public iniquity, and I come to 
bribery — bribery by money, bribery by proffered 
office. Do not charge it upon American institutions. 
It is a sin we got from the other side the water. 
Francis Bacon, the thinker of his century, Francis 
Bacon, of whom it was said when men heard him 
speak they were only fearful that he would stop, 



RULERS. 671 

Francis Bacon, with all his castles, and all his emolu- 
ments, destroyed by bribery, fined $200,000, or what 
is equal to our $200,000, and hurled into London 
Tower, and his only excuse was, he said all his pred- 
ecessors had done the same thing. Lord Chancellor 
Macclesfield destroyed by bribery. Lord Chan- 
cellor Waterbury destroyed by bribery. Benedict 
Arnold, selling the fort in the Highlands for $31,575. 
For this sin Georgy betrayed Hungary, and Ahith- 
ophel forsook David, and Judas kissed Christ. And 
it is abroad in our land. % 

You know in many of the legislatures of this coun- 
try it has been impossible to get a bill through unless 
it had financial consideration. The question has been 
asked softly, sometimes very softly asked in regard to 
a bill, " Is there any money in it?" and the lobbies of 
the legislatures and the National Capitol have been 
crowded with railroad men and manufacturers and 
contractors, and the iniquity has become so great that 
sometimes reformers and philanthropists have been 
laughed out of Harrisburg and Albany and Trenton 
and Washington, because they came empty-handed. 
" You vote for this bill, and I'll vote for that bill." 
" You favor that monopoly of a moneyed institution, 
and I'll favor the other monopoly for another institu- 
tion." And here is a bill that it is going to be very 
hard to get through the legislature, and you will call 
some friends together at a midnight banquet, and 
while they are intoxicated you will have them promise 
to vote your way. 

Here are $5,000 for prudent distribution in this 
direction and here are $1,000 for prudent distribution 
in that direction. Now, we are within four votes of 
having enough. You give $5,000 to that intelligent 



672 



RULERS. 



member from Westchester and you give $2,000 to 
that stupid member from Ulster, and now we are 
within two votes of having it. Give $500 to this 
member who will be sick and stay at home and $300 
to this member who will go to see his great-aunt 
languishing in her last sickness. Now the day has 
come for the passing of the bill. The Speaker's 
gavel strikes. " Senators, are you ready for the ques. 
tion ? All in favor of voting away these thousands or 
millions of dollars will say * aye.' " " Aye, aye, aye, 
aye ! " " The ayes have it." 

Some of the finest houses on Brooklyn Heights, 
and Brooklyn Hill, and on Beacon Street, and on 
Madison Square, and on Rittenhouse Square were 
built out of money paid for votes in legislatures. 
Five hundred small wheels in political machinery 
with cogs reaching into one great center wheel, and 
that wheel has a tire of railroad iron and a crank to 
it on which Satan puts his hand and turns the center 
wheel, and that turns the five hundred other wheels 
of political machinery. While in this country it is 
becoming harder and harder for the great mass of 
the people to get a living, there are too many men 
in this country who have their two millions and their 
ten millions and their twenty millions, and carry the 
legislators in one pocket and the Congress of the 
United States in the other. 

And there is trouble ahead. Revolution. I pray 
God it may be peaceful revolution and at the ballot- 
box. The time must come in this country when men 
shall be sent into public position who cannot be pur- 
chased. I do not want the union of Church and 
State, but I declare that if the Church of God does 
not show itself in favor of the great mass of the 



RULERS. 



6>3 



people as well as in favor of the Lord, the time will 
come when the Church as an institution will be ex- 
tinct, and Christ will go down again to the beach, 
and choose twelve plain, honest fishermen to come 
up into the apostleship of a new dispensation of 
righteousness, man ward and God ward. 

You know that bribery is cursing this land. The 
evil started with its greatest power during the last 
war, when men said, " Now you give me this contract 
above every other applicant, and you shall have ten 
per cent, of all I make by it. You pass these broken- 
down cavalry horses as good, and you shall have 
$5,000 as a bonus." " Bonus " is the word. And so 
they sent down to your fathers and brothers and sons 
rice that was worm-eaten, and bread that was moldy, 
and meat that was rank, and blankets that were 
shoddy, and cavalry horses that stumbled in the 
charge, and tents that sifted the rain into exhausted 
faces. But it was all right. They got the bonus. 

I never so much belived in a Republican form of 
government as I do to-day, for the simple reason that 
any other style of government would have been con- 
sumed long ago. There have been swindles en- 
acted in this nation within the last thirty years 
enough to swamp three monarchies. The Demo- 
cratic party filled its cup of iniquity before it went 
out of power before the war. Then the Republican 
party came along, and its opportunities through the 
contracts were greater, and so it filled its cup of in- 
iquity a little sooner, and there they lie to-day, the 
Democratic party and the Republican party, side by 
side, great loathsome carcasses of iniquity, each one 
worse than the other. Tens of thousands of good 
citizens in all the parties ; but you know as well as I 

43 



674 



RULERS. 



do that party organization in this country is utterly, 
utterly corrupt. 

Now, if there were nothing for you and for me to 
do in this matter, I would not present this subject. 
There are several things for us to do. 

First, stand aloof from all political office unless you 
have your moral principles thoroughly settled. Do 
not go into this blaze of temptation unless you are 
fireproof. Hundreds of respectable men have been 
destroyed for this life, and the life to come, because 
they had not moral principle to stand office. You go 
into some office of authority without moral prin- 
ciple, and before you get through you will lie, and 
you will swear, and you will gamble, and you will 
steal. You say that is not complimentary. Well, 
I always was clumsy at compliments. 

Another thing for you to do is to be faithful at the 
ballot-box. Do not stand on your dignity and say, 
" I'll not go where the rabble are." If need be put 
on your old clothes and just push yourself through 
amid the unwashed and vote. Vote for men who 
love God and hate rum. You cannot say, you ought 
not to say, " I have nothing to do with this matter." 
Then you will insult the graves of your fathers who 
died for the establishment of the government and you 
will insult the graves of your children who may live 
to feel the results of your negligence. 

Another thing for you to do : Evangelize the people. 
Get the hearts of the people right, and they will vote 
right. That woman who this afternoon in Sunday- 
school teaches six boys how to be Christians will do 
more for the future of the country than the man who 
writes the finest essay about the Federal Constitution. 
I know there are a great many good people who think 



RULERS. 675 

that God ought to be recognized in the Constitution, 
and they are making a move in that direction. I am 
most anxious that God shall be in the hearts of the 
people. Get their hearts right, and then they will 
vote right. 

If there be fifty million people in this country, 
then at least the fifty-millionth part of the responsi- 
bility rests on you. What we want is a great revival 
of religion reaching from sea to sea, and it is going 
to come. A newspaper gentleman asked me in St. 
Louis a few weeks ago what I thought of revivals. 
I said I thought so much of them I never put my 
faith in anything else. We want thousands in a day, 
hundreds of thousands in a day, nations in a day. 
Get all the people evangelized, brought under Chris- 
tianized influences. These great evils that we now 
so much deplore will be banished from the land. 

And remember, my friends, that we are at last to 
be judged, not as nations, but as individuals — in that 
day when empires and republics shall alike go down 
and we shall have to give account for ourselves, for 
what we have done and for what we have neglected 
to do — in that day when the earth itself will be a 
heap of ashes scattered in the blast of the nostrils of 
the Lord God Almighty. God save the common- 
wealth of New York ! God save the United States 
of America! 



CHAPTER LXVI. 



DEDICATORY PRAYER AT THE NEW ORLEANS EXPO- 
SITION, DECEMBER 1 6, 1 884. 

"Lord God of nations, hear our opening prayer. 
Gathered from all parts of this land, and from both 
sides of the sea, and from under all skies, we ask for 
thy blessing. Let it come upon the officers, and the 
directors, and the managers of this World's Exposi- 
tion. May this day be the beginning of a new dispen- 
sation of national prosperity and brotherhood. May 
a potent influence go forth from these palaces of 
industry which shall result in the world's having 
more complete apparel, and better food, more com- 
fortable shelter, and more thorough education. We 
pray Thee that this Exposition may result in spread- 
ing out the folded sails of our paralyzed shipping, in 
putting bands on all the silent factory wheels, and in 
starting the plow in longer, and deeper, and richer 
furrow ; in opening the door to all the hidden treas- 
ures of coal, and iron, and precious metal, and in 
making more demand for printer's type, and painter's 
pencil, and sculptor's chisel, and carpenter's rule, and 
mason's trowel, and author's pen, and in commencing 
for all the land a process of Edenization. By this 
great gathering, day after day, and month after 
month, may the last feeling of sectional discord be 
gone, and North and South, East and West, carry the 
four parts of one great national harmony. May it 
be the unification of North and South America ! 

676 



DEDICATORY PRAYER. ' 677 

"Gracious God ! we pray Thee, by means of this 
Exposition, solve for us the agonizing question of 
supply and demand. Alas ! that there should be so 
many hungry in a land of so much wheat, so many 
cold in a land of so much cotton, wool, and flax. We 
ask of Thee, O God, to come to the rescue of this 
nation. Rouse and accelerate all our financial, com- 
mercial, political, and educational interests, and as 
Thou hast made of one blood all the nations of the 
earth, we pray that this gathering of all nationalities 
may impress upon us a true sense of our consan- 
guinity. 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth 
peace and good will toward men.' May the clock 
strike 'one' upon a new day of prosperity and 
righteousness and plenty. Quicken all our slumber- 
ing industries, and let the hammers sound 'the anvil 
chorus' from sea to sea. Under thy guidance may 
capital and labor be crowned side by side under these 
arches. Give one clear command from the heavens 
to this nation, and say unto the agricultural and 
manufacturing, educational and religious interests of 
this country, 'Go forward !' 

"Lord God of Joshua ! we do not ask that the sun 
may stand still for a few hours in order to give our 
best interests an opportunity of winning the day ; but 
we do ask that the sun may never go down on the 
prosperity of this people. God be merciful unto us, 
and bless us, and make thy face to shine upon us, so 
that thy name may be known upon earth, and thy 
saving help among all nations, and as we have heard 
that the wealth and prosperity of nations have some- 
times hastened their overthrow, and as we know that 
while the banqueting went on the finger of doom 
came out of the black sleeve of the darkness and wrote 



\ 



678 DEDICATORY PRAYER. 

upon the wall, ' Weighed in the balance and found 
waiting,' we pray Thee that as our prosperity goes 
onward, our schools and our colleges, and our 
churches, and our reformatory organizations may 
prosper and triumph. And may our institutions thus 
perfected and exalted, remain unmolested from inter- 
nal strife and from foreign attack, until that day when 
the angel, with one foot on the land, and the other 
on the sea, shall swear by Him that liveth forever 
and ever that time shall be no longer. And so may 
the world's doom and the nation's overthrow be 
simultaneous, and to God the only wise, the only 
good, the only great, foe glory now and forever, 
Amen." 



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